10779/rcsi.10774601.v1 Ruairi F. Brugha Ruairi F. Brugha Carlos Bruen Carlos Bruen Politics matters: a response to recent commentaries. Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland 2019 Politics response commentaries. Epidemiology 2019-11-22 15:45:55 Journal contribution https://repository.rcsi.com/articles/journal_contribution/Politics_matters_a_response_to_recent_commentaries_/10774601 <p>McCoy and Singh rightly comment on how extraordinary it is to need to spell out the political nature, actions and motivations underlying global health policy (<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4154556/#R1">1</a>), which articulates where they (and we) are coming from. Yet without such commentators, it would be easy for the global health community today to forget how political and macro-economic decisions in the 1980s and 90s gave oxygen to the social determinants that undermined the health of populations, especially in low-income countries. These fuelled the diseases that are the focus of today’s global health partnerships; and some of the same organisations played leading roles in setting the global health agenda then, as today.</p>