Understanding global security - Peter Hough

HEALTH THREATS TO SECURITY
Urbanization
The trend for population to grow in urban areas at the expense of rural areas has
been witnessed since industrialization began in Europe in the eighteenth century, but
has become particularly prominent in the global South over recent decades. This has
had profound implications for the spread of disease in two dimensions:
1 Overcrowding in LDC cities has led to many people living in squalor, providing
the conditions for diseases associated with poor sanitation to emerge and for
other diseases to be more readily transmitted among a large population.
Examples of this include dysentery and cholera, chiefly spread by unsanitary
food and water.
2 Urban encroachment on traditionally distinct rural areas can cause diseases
associated with the rural environment to contaminate the urban population.
Deforestation, for example, has contributed to the spread of tropical diseases
such as malaria and leishmaniasis since the tropical insects have come into
contact with more people. In addition, entirely new human ailments are believed
to have emerged as a result of greater contact with other animal species that
has allowed cross-species transmission of ‘zoonotic’ diseases. At least twothirds
of the new diseases that emerged in the 1990s originated in other animals
(Heymann 2001: 9). CJD was the most high profile of these, while some
theories have suggested that, a decade or two earlier, AIDS was transmitted to
humans by monkeys.
Development projects
Human-driven changes to the environment other than urbanization can also upset the
equilibrium in a given ecosystem and cause a resurgence of certain diseases. Large
dam projects in Africa, for example, have been known to have contributed to the
proliferation of water-breeding disease vectors such as mosquitoes and water snails,
causing the spread of Rift Valley Fever and schistomiasis (NIC 2000). Environmental
changes generally seen as positive can also give rise to new or more pronounced
health threats to man. Reforestation changes the balance of nature as much as
deforestation and certain species, including humans, can be harmed as a result.
A recent rise in cases of Lyme disease has been witnessed in New England, USA and
parts of Northern Europe where extensive tree planting schemes have occurred.
Lyme disease is carried by deer ticks and deer populations have grown significantly
in many of these new forest plantations (Weiss 2002 : 25). 1
Technological advances
A further but inverted link between economic development and disease can be seen
in the spread of certain diseases associated specifically with technologically advanced
societies. Nosocomial infections (hospital-acquired) such as Staphylococcus aureas
(the bacterium causing ‘toxic shock syndrome’), are associated with modern invasive
medical procedures and have become more prevalent in recent years (NIC 2000).
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