Résumé
The international borders, often reduced to the territorial margins of countries, are in fact strongly structuring elements of the life of the populations occupying the cross-border spaces that extend on both sides of the border line. They impact the supply of, access to and use of health care, the monitoring by health services of highly mobile populations - potentially carriers of pathogens - and make difficult the exchange of data and information between neighboring countries, preventing optimal epidemiological surveillance and response.The difficulties in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic in these territories, despite the closure of land borders, has once again demonstrated the importance of these areas in monitoring and controlling the epidemiological situation at national and regional levels. To give another example, it is now recognized that malaria elimination (one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations) is challenged by the specificities of cross-border areas (Wangdi et al., 2015).It is therefore necessary to implement and promote the concept of "cross-border health". To our point of view, such a concept is not reduced to the surveillance of diseases that cross the borders, but is seen as a trans-national, cross-sectorial and inter-disciplinary approach of health in cross-border living spaces, and as a local and territorialized implementation of the global health concept.The Sentinela Joint International Laboratory (LMI Sentinela, http://lmi-sentinela.unb.br/) has been notably created to address such a challenge and obtained significant results at the international borders of the Brazilian Amazon. Its ambition is to become a reference center for the implementation of cross-border, integrated and territorialized health surveillance, and to promote the concept of cross-border health at the national and international levels, in teaching, research and public policies.This motivated the Sentinela Joint International Laboratory to co-propose such a session at Geomed conference.