Understanding global security - Peter Hough

HEALTH THREATS TO SECURITY
country, which can best be described as a policy of denial. Mbeki has regularly
downplayed the significance of AIDS in South Africa and even disputed the almost
universally accepted link between the disease and Human Immunodeficiency Virus
(HIV). States have lost huge slices of income as a result of international panic in the
response to an epidemic. Tourism to the UK was affected by the 2001 outbreak of ‘foot
and mouth’ even though it was a cattle disease and represented no threat to human
life. The likelihood is that many human lives have been sacrificed on the altars of
profit and national pride.
Cultural globalization
The diffusion of disease around the world is not entirely a one-way process of transmission
from South to North. Globalization has also seen certain non-communicable
‘lifestyle illnesses’, associated with mass-consumption societies of the global North,
head southwards as people in LDCs adopt some of the unhealthy practices associated
with modernization. The consumption of high-fat and high-sugar foods, for example,
has led to previously minor health problems such as obesity, heart disease and
diabetes becoming more prominent in many LDCs. Tobacco smoking has become
more common in a number of LDCs (encouraged by northern MNCs faced with a
declining market at home), leading to a rise in lung cancer. Alcohol and narcotic
drugs in LDCs may not be being supplied by the North but their increased usage,
and associated problems of addiction and infection via needles, is believed to be
a cultural import (McMurray and Smith 2001).
Non-communicable diseases account for 59 per cent of all deaths in the world.
Malignant neoplasms (cancers) taken collectively amount to the world’s biggest
killer, with an annual death toll of 6.9 million, slightly above ischaemic heart disease
(see Table 7.3).
The development of global health policy
The transnational threat posed by infectious disease epidemics has long been
apparent to statesmen and participants in international commerce but countermeasures
were slow to develop owing to an absence of any real epidemiological
understanding of contagious diseases not spread directly by human to human (such
as leprosy). The first systematic political measures to contain the international spread
of disease can be dated back to fourteenth-century Venice and the origins of imposing
a quarantine on people arriving from certain countries. Ships which had come from
or visited ports known to be afflicted with the Black Death were required by law
to wait docked at sea for 30 days, before being allowed to land if no evidence of the
plague was apparent. This procedure was referred to as ‘trentina’ from the Latin for
30, and when in the next century the time scale was extended to 40 days it became
known as ‘quarantine’ from the Latin for 40 days.
Other European states adopted similar quarantine measures over the
next three centuries, but coordinated international action to combat the spread of
disease was not attempted until the mid-nineteenth century, when the unprecedented
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