Debate on the fast advancing society proned to become a breeding ground for motar diseases debate
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A foreign agent that invades sovereign territory, evades detection, kills civilians, and disrupts the economy is a security threat by most definitions. Not all new diseases are highly lethal, contagious, and able to spread internationally, inciting panic as they do. But those that can are international threats to health security.
We live in a world where threats to health arise from the speed and volume of air travel, the way we produce and trade food, the way we use and misuse antibiotics, and the way we manage the environment.
All of these activities affect one of the greatest direct threats to health security: outbreaks of emerging and epidemic-prone diseases.
Outbreaks are unique public health events because of their ability to cross national borders, undetected and undeterred. Traditional defences at national borders are no protection against a microbe incubating in an unsuspecting traveller or an insect hiding in a cargo hold.
All nations are at risk. This universal vulnerability creates a need for collective defences and for shared responsibility in making these defences work.
Outbreaks are a much larger menace today than they were just three decades ago. They are larger in two ways.
First, changes in the way humanity inhabits the planet have led to the emergence of new diseases in unprecedented numbers. In the thirty years from 1973 to 2003, when SARS appeared, 39 pathogenic agents capable of causing human disease were newly identified.
The names of some are notoriously well-known: Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and the organisms responsible for toxic shock syndrome and legionnaire’s disease. Others include new forms of epidemic cholera and meningitis, Hanta virus, Hendra virus, Nipah virus, and H5N1 avian influenza.
This is an ominous trend. It is historically unprecedented, and it is certain to continue.
Second, the unique conditions of the 21st century have amplified the invasive and disruptive power of outbreaks. We are highly mobile. Airlines now carry almost 2 billion passengers a year. SARS taught us how quickly a new disease can spread along the routes of international air travel. Financial markets are closely intertwined. Businesses use global sourcing and just-in-time production. These trends mean that the disruption caused by an outbreak in one part of the world can quickly ricochet throughout the global financial and business systems. Finally, our electronic interconnectedness spreads panic just as far and just as fast.