FASTER THAN BEFORE
2007 World Health Report warns of growing health threats, demands collective global response
GENEVA
Infectious diseases are emerging faster than ever before, the World Health Organization warned in a report, urging closer global cooperation to tackle the growing health threat. The report warned of the threat from epidemics, food-borne diseases, chemical, biological, or nuclear accidents or attacks, and industrial pollution. It also evoked climate change "that may put millions of people at risk in several countries."
Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director general, highlighted the impact of population growth, rapid urbanization, intensive farming practices, environmental degradation, and the misuse of antibiotics, saying they helped the microbial world thrive and evolve.
"The international dimensions of emerging and epidemic-prone diseases are ominous," Chan said. "Given today's universal vulnerability to these threats, better security calls for global solidarity, for collective action in the face of a shared threat'.
Open sharing of medical know-how, technology, and supplies between rich and poor countries is also crucial, and "one of the most feasible routes to global health security," it said in the 2007 World Health Report: A Safer Future.
Since the 1970s new diseases have been identified at the "unprecedented" rate of one or more per year, the report said. Other centuries-old threats such as influenza, malaria, and tuberculosis were also thriving due to a combination of biological mutations, rising resistance to antibiotics, and weak health systems.
"We clearly have gone through a huge shift-our relationship to the animal kingdom, our travel, our social, sexual, and other behavior have changed the nature of our relationship with the microbial world," said Mike Ryan, head of the WHO epidemic and pandemic alert. "The result of that is the emergence of new pathogens and the spread of new pathogens around the world," despite a heightened capacity to identify them, he said.
Serious gaps
The report stressed that health threats were no longer easily confined within a country but could spread around the world swiftly, partly due to the expansion in passenger air travel over the past half century and to trade. It warned of "serious gaps, particularly in health services in many countries," caused by poverty or a lack of investment, that severely weakened the global safety net.
Health and medical care were not only essential for treatment and prevention, but also for detecting new threats such as outbreaks, new diseases, as well as bioweapon attacks, environmental health problems, said the report. "It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like AIDS, another Ebola, another SARS, sooner or later."
The three historical advances that helped stifle diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, and smallpox-quarantines, better sanitation, and immunization-became successes once they were applied internationally, the report argued.
The UN agency's battle to fight disease often came up against political and logistical problems. The report referred to the suspension of the polio vaccination program in northern Nigeria in 2003, when the authorities there claimed it could leave children sterile.
"The result was a large outbreak of polio across northern Nigeria and the reinfection of previously polio-free areas in the south of the country." The outbreak left thousands of children paralyzed and spread to 19 other countries that had been free of the disease.
The civil war in Angola had hampered efforts to tackle an outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in 2005: 90 percent of the 200 people affected died.
The WHO introduced new international health regulations this year to sharpen the response of its 193 members to major health threats within their own borders or abroad. It is also trying to resolve Indonesian complaints about the availability of newly developed medicines in poor countries, which halted crucial bird flu virus sharing with foreign laboratories.
The sharing of tissue samples from human victims is needed to detect possible mutations in the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus-one of the biggest fears of the beginning of this century-that might lead to a flu pandemic.
M AFP
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