Understanding global security - Peter Hough

HEALTH THREATS TO SECURITY
accompanied by the globalization of foodborne illnesses. An outbreak of cyclospora
in Canada and the USA in 1996, for example, was traced to imported raspberries
from Guatemala (NIC 2000). In addition, once localized outbreaks of disease due to
hygienic failings in food production are now more likely to become globalized since
consumers come from increasingly far afield. The spread of the cattle disease Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and its human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
(CJD) from the UK to other parts of Europe following its outbreak in 1995 was a highprofile
example of this.
Just as more frequent voluntary movements of people have spread diseases, so have
more frequent enforced movements, as a consequence of natural or human disaster.
People fleeing countries beset by war or famine will obviously be far more likely
to be carrying diseases and also more vulnerable to contracting them. Action by
recipzient countries and international organizations can help alleviate this. Many
developed counties, for example, have legal provisions waiving restrictions on entry
for immigrants with infectious diseases if they are refugees rather than conventional
migrants. At greater risk are peoples coerced into moves to other parts of their own
state rather than abroad, who technically are not refugees but ‘internally displaced
persons’ (IDPs). Such people are less likely to receive assistance, either domestic or
international, and tend to be forced to settle in overcrowded and unhygienic locations.
For example, tuberculosis broke out in 2002 in Macedonia among IDPs crowded into
unsanitary accommodation to escape civil conflict.
Refugees
Insect and microbe resistance
A major factor behind the recent counter-attacks of disease against man in the war
on disease has been the increased redundancy of humankind’s weaponry. The
globalization of the human strategy has had the side-effect of globalizing resistance.
Both pathogens and the pests by which they are transmitted have increasingly
developed immunities to the pesticides and antibiotic drugs used against them. Many
insects and rodents have become resistant to insecticides and rodenticides used
against them over the last 50 years, with diseases like malaria resurging from near
elimination as a result. Similarly, many antibiotics have become increasingly ineffective
in treating illnesses they once could be relied on to combat. That most renowned
panacea penicillin, for example, can no longer be guaranteed to treat gonorrhoea or
pneumonia. Additionally, resistance requires increased innovation in antibiotic
development, increasing the costs of treatment and exacerbating the vulnerability of
people in the world’s poorest states. For both pesticides and antibiotics, overuse has
been a part cause of target resistance and more cautious application is now
understood as the best strategy against an enemy more ingenious than imagined in
the 1950s and 1960s. That period of the conflict between man and disease looks ever
more like a short victorious phase of a long, fluctuating war.
157