Iris Borowy

Shanghai University | SHU · Department of History

Hazardous waste began gaining public attention in industrialized countries in the 1970s, partly as a result of several scandals involving former waste sites. Early on, several international organizations (IOs), notably the EEC, NATO, OECD and WHO, addressed the issue in publications, surveys and the collection of data. Collectively, these initiativ...

Many of the international technical agencies formed after 1945 addressed environmental topics within their specific fields of work. By the late 1960s, a growing awareness of pollution and an emerging environmental movement in Western countries led to a perceived need for more coordinated and institutionalized international cooperation on the enviro...

Ever since the early 1960s, the United Nations has acknowledged science and technology as integral components of developmental policies. While this connection was initially perceived as the application of findings from scientific research conducted in the Global North, by the 1970s, in the context of negotiations for a New International Economic Or...

In 1970, the OECD was the first international organization to create a permanent committee specifically dedicated to environmental issues. For 2 years, the OECD struggled to define its environmental program both internally and vis-à-vis other international organizations that similarly sought to establish their places in international environmental...

Between 1949 and 1989, both the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East, engaged in health-related relations with low-income countries in the global South. The strong position of the churches in West Germany and the dominant position of the state in the East provided the preconditions for d...

Industrialization and massive use of fossil fuels made large-scale poverty unnecessary for the first time in human history. In the course of the twentieth century three goals emerged as broadly accepted central purposes of socioeconomic development: to increase the material well-being of people everywhere, especially of the poor (wealth), to improv...

The extraordinary economic growth rates of the twentieth century are historically exceptional and a continuation into the future seems neither possible nor desirable. Consequently, it is in the interest of public health to actively shape a socio-economic transformation towards a system that is not based on growth. “Degrowth” provides coherent guide...

Between 1979 and 1989 the government of the German Democratic Republic provided health assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua. After initial relief aid, the Sandinista embrace of a primary health care-based health system made East German health support difficult. The non-convertible currency, the repressive quality of the East German leadership, and th...

The future of economic growth is one of the decisive questions of the twenty-first century. Alarmed by declining growth rates in industrialized countries, climate change, and rising socio-economic inequalities, among other challenges, more and more people demand to look for alternatives beyond growth. However, so far these current debates about sus...

Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are compounds believed to mimic hormones in animal and human bodies and which are thought therefore to be a potential threat to health. Agencies including the European Commission, the International Labour Office (ILO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Envi...

At the beginning of the twentieth century a new pathogen arrived on the world scene. Initially, it had only limited impact but it soon turned into a formidable public health threat. The pathogen is called motorized vehicle, it comes in the forms of cars, buses and trucks, and it causes road traffic accidents, affecting public health by causing road...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) evolved in the competition between two perspectives on development: one that sees the reasons for poverty and misery in the specificities of the countries concerned (the localist view) and another that looks at the global context, including and especially the policies of “developed” high-income countries (the...

The League of Nations, the crisis of the 1930s and health The League of Nations Health Organization was challenged by the economic crisis of 1929. Even when it became clear that the circumstances would have a negative effect on public health, this effect was not easily detectable from mortality data, which meant that the situation was difficult to...