Understanding global security - Peter Hough

HEALTH THREATS TO SECURITY
without actually eradicating the disease. In line with these and many other successes,
the WHO optimistically declared in 1977 that victory against disease was in sight in
setting the target of ‘Health for All by the Year 2000’. By the end of the twentieth
century, however, the WHO’s hope that it could shift its main focus to primary health
care (ensuring all people have access to health care, clean water and sanitation) had
been overtaken by events with the revival of apparently dormant illnesses and the
arrival of new, even more virulent diseases.
Although human history is replete with peaks and troughs of disease, a number
of factors particular to the contemporary world can be offered as partial explanations
for the deepening and widening of disease over the last quarter of a century.
Increased travel and migration
History shows that epidemics and pandemics of diseases have tended to occur when
previously isolated human populations mix. The Roman Empire was beset by periodic
plagues of previously unknown magnitude, new diseases entered Europe from Asia
in the wake of Marco Polo’s establishment of links in the thirteenth century, and
diseases left Europe for the Americas with Columbus and his successors from the
late fifteenth century (Pirages and Runci 2000: 176–180). Human groups over time
can evolve immunities to certain strains of disease that when encountered by humans
who have evolved (genetically) from other geographical areas can be deadly. The
prevalence of holiday ailments, often erroneously blamed on foreign food, bears
testimony to the fact that this phenomenon persists. Ever-greater levels of contact
between people ultimately should diminish the deadliest impacts of this by making
human immunities more similar but, in the meantime, contemporary global social
change is a root of the problem rather than the cure.
The much more frequent movement of people around the globe also serves to
transport diseases that are dangerous to all to new parts of the world in ever-greater
quantities. Aeroplanes and international shipping are well-established hosts for the
spread of dangerous pathogens, carried either directly by the tourists or on insect or
rodent vectors. A virulent strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae, originating in the
holiday haven of Spain in the early 1990s, spread in this way throughout the world in
a few weeks (NIC 2000), and the 90 cases of the mosquito-borne disease dengue
reported in the USA in 1998 were all acquired overseas (NIC 2000). Immigrants will,
of course, tend to be ‘vetted’ for alien diseases by state authorities before admission,
but this is neither feasible nor politically acceptable for tourists and other visitors
entering a country or, particularly, for citizens returning from abroad.
Increased trade
As with travel, the link between trade and the spread of disease is well established.
The Black Death arrived in Europe directly via goods imported from the Orient
and, although trading standards have evolved somewhat since that time, the rapid
proliferation of trade links in recent years has opened up more potential routes for
disease to spread. The globalization of food production and movement has been
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