Understanding global security - Peter Hough

HEALTH THREATS TO SECURITY
and coordinating various regional and disease-specific surveillance networks into a
single ‘network of networks’. GOARN has also worked on pooling the resources of
participating states and organizations so that international teams of experts can
quickly be assembled and dispatched to outbreak scenes. The 2000 Ebola outbreak
in Uganda, for example, prompted a rapid international response led by GOARN
while, in 2003, the notoriously secretive Chinese government was quickly forced into
coming clean after initially attempting to downplay the outbreak of Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). David Heymann, head of the WHO’s communicable
diseases operations, has even gone so far as to suggest that: ‘[h]ad this system been
in place in the early 1980s, AIDS might never have become a global epidemic on
the scale we see today’ (Heymann 2001: 12). In line with such developments, the
International Health Regulations (IHRs), the keystone of WHO policy which require
governments to give international notification of epidemics, should be extended by
the World Health Assembly of 2004. The IHRs, which can be dated back to the
International Sanitary Conventions at the dawn of global health policy, aim to extend
notification obligations beyond the long-standing requirements for cholera, plague
and yellow fever to all diseases constituting an international threat.
The strengthening of global civil society
Many pressure groups, such as Oxfam and Save the Children, have a long history
of highlighting the plight of disease victims but recent years have seen a significant
deepening of NGO activity in this field. A new breed of pressure groups are
increasingly using advanced communications technology to assist medics in LDCs.
The US-based group SatelLife, for example, make use of satellites to link medics in
LDCs to their developed world. TEPHINET (Training Programs in Epidemiology
and Public Health Internventions Network) was set up in 1997 and disperses help
on a not-for-profit basis. The medical profession itself increasingly lobbies at the
global level. MedAct is a group comprising health professionals that campaigns for
governments to give greater consideration to the health impact of their policies
in areas such as military security and economic development. This is a more overtly
political stance than the traditional neutrality of groups such as the Red Cross,
seeking to provide relief to human suffering in crisis situations. The radicalization
of pressure groups, in public health and in International Relations in general, is best
characterized by the work of the group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (Doctors
Without Borders). MSF consciously chooses to ignore the constraints of sovereignty
in its operations, sending in medical teams to countries without being specifically
requested to enter by the government and making overtly political statements on the
right of individual people to receive medical attention. The UN–NGO symbiosis, best
known in the global politics of the environment and human rights, is also evident in
health. Public health pressure groups enjoy a strong relationship with the WHO and
have been extensively consulted and utilized in initiatives such as GOARN.
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