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Abstract
This paper proposes an explanation concerning why some global health issues such as
HIV/AIDS attract significant attention from international and national leaders, while
other issues that also represent a high mortality and morbidity burden, such as pneumonia
and malnutrition, remain neglected. The rise, persistence and decline of a global
health issue may best be explained by the way in which its policy community - the
network of individuals and organizations concerned with the problem - comes to understand
and portray the issue and establishes institutions that can sustain this portrayal.
This explanation emphasizes the power of ideas and challenges interpretations of issue
ascendance and decline that place primary emphasis on material, objective factors
such as mortality and morbidity levels and the existence of cost-effective interventions.
This explanation has implications for our understanding of strategic public health
communication. If ideas in the form of issue portrayals are central, strategic communication
is far from a secondary public health activity: it is at the heart of what global
health policy communities do.