Practice IB Global Politics Topic Health with authentic exam-style questions for both SL and HL students. This question bank focuses on the exact syllabus content for Health and mirrors Paper 1, 2, 3 style where relevant.
Get instant solutions, detailed explanations, and build confidence with questions aligned to IB examiner expectations.
Stimulus
Data extract (adapted): The table below summarises the political geography of air pollution and its health toll in two settings.
(a) Using the stimulus, three things it suggests about why air pollution is hard to govern.
(b) one political issue raised by the way air pollution crosses the boundaries of the governments meant to control it.
| Indicator | Figure (adapted) |
|---|
| Estimated annual deaths linked to air pollution in India | around 1.6 to 2.1 million |
| Share of Delhi's worst winter smog attributed to crop-residue burning in neighbouring states | up to a third on peak days |
| Governments that must coordinate to clear Delhi's air | national government plus several state governments |
| People across Southeast Asia exposed to haze from Indonesian peatland fires (2015) | tens of millions |
| Regional framework meant to address the haze | ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution |
Note: figures are illustrative and adapted from public health and environmental reporting.
(d) the extent to which the health harms of air pollution are caused more by weak political coordination than by the pace of economic development.
Stimulus
There are two competing ways to understand what makes people healthy. The biomedical model locates health inside the body, treating illness as a malfunction to be corrected with drugs, surgery or clinical intervention. The social determinants model instead traces health outcomes to the conditions in which people live, including income, housing, education, discrimination and social support, arguing that clinics alone cannot fix problems rooted in society.
The global mental health gap illustrates the stakes. Hundreds of millions of people with depression or anxiety receive no treatment, yet Sustainable Development Goal target 3.4 recognises that mental wellbeing depends on far more than medication, reflecting poverty, isolation and stigma. Even PEPFAR, the vast United States programme against HIV/AIDS, learned that supplying antiretroviral drugs was not enough, and that stigma, gender inequality and food insecurity had to be addressed for clinical treatment to work.
Adapted from "Beyond the Clinic Door" by Dr Sofia Ramirez, professor of social epidemiology, The Review of Health and Society (2024).
(a) Using at least two examples from the stimulus, the biomedical model of health with the social determinants model
(b) With explicit reference to a global political challenge from one of your researched case studies, how a state-led programme working with community actors has been used to address the social determinants of a health condition
(c) Based on your answer to part (b), recommend how a similar combined approach could be applied to close the global mental health treatment gap
Stimulus
Text extract (adapted): "For years South Africa carried one of the world's heaviest HIV burdens while its government hesitated. In the early 2000s President Thabo Mbeki questioned whether HIV caused AIDS and delayed the public rollout of antiretroviral drugs, a stance that researchers later estimated cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Activists in the Treatment Action Campaign took the government to court and won a 2002 order to widen access to treatment. Two decades on, South Africa runs the largest antiretroviral programme on earth, with more than 5 million people on treatment, funded through a mix of its own health budget and external support such as the United States PEPFAR programme. Officials now describe treatment access less as a scientific question than as a test of political commitment."
(a) Using the stimulus, three things it suggests about what drives access to HIV treatment in South Africa.
(b) one political issue raised by South Africa's shift from AIDS denialism to the world's largest antiretroviral programme.
(c) Recommend a course of action that a national government and its civil-society organisations could take to sustain treatment access when donor funding is uncertain, and consider its limitations.
(d) the extent to which access to treatment depends more on domestic political will than on global funding.
Stimulus
Text extract (adapted): "The world's system for governing health was built to fight outbreaks. The International Health Regulations require countries to detect and report infectious threats, and when Ebola or COVID-19 crosses borders the WHO can declare a global emergency. The United States opioid epidemic fits none of that machinery. Overdose deaths have run near 100,000 a year, driven first by the aggressive marketing of prescription painkillers such as OxyContin by Purdue Pharma and later by a shift to illicit fentanyl. There is no international emergency declaration for a slow-moving, behavioural and commercially driven crisis, and the WHO's mandate for non-communicable and behavioural health is far weaker than its powers over epidemics. Critics argue the architecture is tuned to catch a virus and blind to an epidemic of addiction."
(a) Using the stimulus, three things it suggests about the gaps in global health governance revealed by the US opioid epidemic.
(b) one political issue raised by the mismatch between outbreak-focused global health governance and the US opioid epidemic.
(c) Recommend a course of action that the WHO and states could take to strengthen global governance of non-communicable and behavioural health crises, and consider its limitations.
(d) the extent to which global health governance is poorly equipped to address non-communicable and behavioural health crises compared with infectious-disease outbreaks.
Stimulus
Global health programmes tend to follow one of two logics. Vertical, disease-specific programmes concentrate resources, staff and technology on defeating a single illness, allowing rapid, measurable progress against a named target. Horizontal health-system strengthening instead invests in the general foundations of care, such as clinics, trained workers, supply chains and surveillance, that serve every condition at once.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a partnership of the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Rotary International and the Gates Foundation, is a landmark of the vertical model, cutting polio cases by more than ninety-nine per cent through targeted campaigns. Yet the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic exposed the cost of neglecting horizontal capacity, as Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone lacked the basic health workers, laboratories and trust needed to contain an outbreak that vertical funding had never been designed to prevent.
Adapted from "Two Ways to Save a Life" by Dr Kwame Asante, director of health-systems research, The Global Public Health Quarterly (2020).
(a) Using at least two examples from the stimulus, vertical disease-specific programmes with horizontal health-system strengthening
(b) With explicit reference to a global political challenge from one of your researched case studies, how a multi-actor partnership has been used to pursue a vertical disease-eradication goal
(c) Based on your answer to part (b), how the resources of a vertical eradication partnership could be redirected to strengthen horizontal health systems
(d) the extent to which vertical disease-specific programmes undermine rather than support durable health security. Base your response on one researched case study and integrate links to at least two HL extension topic areas.
(d) the extent to which lasting improvements in health depend more on addressing social determinants than on expanding biomedical treatment. Base your response on one researched case study and integrate links to at least two HL extension topic areas.
