Amid news that the number of Ebola cases had reached more than 6,000 in West Africa , public wellness and external security experts from around the world gathered in Washington , DC last week for a straight-from-the-shoulder discussion of how the global community miscarry to hold in the disease — and what lessons still needed to be memorize .
scientific discipline writerSarah Zielinskihas just publisheda thorough overviewof the group discussion that is worth read in full . Among the key issues discussed was the international reply to the eruption , or lack thereof :
“ The Ebola crisis right now is one of the clearest illustration that [ of ] the link between the circumstance on the ground — the lack of public health resources and infrastructure — and the importance of addressing that as a threat to global wellness surety , ” said Scott Gordon , director of the Window of Opportunity Project at PATH , an international non - profit organization working on world-wide health invention .
Speakers concur that the international reply to the ongoing epidemic has been inadequate . “ We just ca n’t abnegate that the answer was very late , ” say Ron Waldman , an epidemiologist at George Washington University . But he admonish that any efforts implemented now should be cut to the epidemic as it currently exists ; measure that might have forge in June to contain the disease , such as building a few large hospital , may be ineffective now … .
Preventing a succeeding crisis like Ebola ask better diagnostic tools and disease surveillance web so that outbreaks can be identified and stop before they get out of handwriting … .More complex test being evolve can be useful but only if the mass using them have the necessary knowledge and support . … .And , any newfangled tests will have to be capable to work in environments where resources such as electricity and refrigeration may be in myopic supplying … .. Past elbow grease to provide help in germinate land have not always film into consideration those limitations .
But , even with all the ideas and a enceinte willingness among people in the international community to help , there was business organisation that keep these travail over the tenacious terminal figure may be difficult . “ One of , if not the , greatest challenges in terms of modernize the wellness security order of business , ” noted Keiji Fukuda , assistant director - general for health security at the World Health Organization “ is that we go through an emergency brake , there ’s a large deal of attention , there ’s a lot of lyric said about how important it is , then it tend to vaporise . ”
The Reglobalization of Disease
Fukuda ’s warning , in particular , stands out for me . I ’ve heard such global call to action ingeminate clip and again , in the aftermath of AIDS , SARS and H1N1 . Our aid to global health often fades once the immediate crisis passes . And , the accuracy is , we are still relatively inexperient in deal with infectious diseases at the outside level .
David Fidler , an expert in external natural law and infective disease , wrotean insightful essayfor Foreign Policy back in 2001 , which , unfortunately , remains relevant today .
Back in the 19th century , Fidler explain , international government were very proactive in dealing with public wellness . The expansion of travel and trade fire concerns in Europe and North America about the importation of disease from Asia , Africa , and Latin America . Overcrowded sustenance conditions , inadequate sewerage system , and unclean imbibing H2O made those subsist in Europe and North America vulnerable to contagious disease — a fact underscored by periodical cholera epidemic that swept through their city between the 1830s and 1890s . Realizing that interior strategies , such as quarantine , were useless without outside cooperation , European governments launched a serial of international sanitary conferences and pact that span the second one-half of the nineteenth and first one-half of the 20th centuries . Outside the arenas of warfare , diplomacy , and trade , infective disease provoked perhaps the early and most vivid process of internationalization .
However :
In the latter one-half of the twentieth century , great - power interest in international infectious disease restraint wane . For developed country , external cooperation largely took the form of the technical humanitarianism of the World Health Organization and nongovernmental organizations . At first glimpse , this decline in disease statesmanship seems counterintuitive . The swiftness and volume of world-wide trade and travel continued to maturate , creating unprecedented opportunity for pathogen to spread worldwide . But industrialized countries had ( literally ) clean up their acts and regained home control condition of public wellness through sanitization reform ; their cities were no longer breed grounds for cholera epidemics or tuberculosis . Moreover , scientific enquiry lead to advance in drugs and vaccines that helped industrialized countries reduce the ravages of fear diseases such as polio and tuberculosis .
Yet , as fear of infectious disease go down in industrialize Carry Nation , every twelvemonth pathogenic microbes and parasites continued to kill millions of people in the developing world , where poor socioeconomic conditions supply a fertile brooder for tuberculosis , malaria , acute respiratory infections , measles , and diarrheal diseases , as well as new scourges such as AIDS . And the situation is getting worse … .. As a result , developing countries harbor deepen reservoir of dangerous disease that the forces of globalisation can diffuse with ease .
Today , uprise countries — like the aristocratic courtiers in Edgar Allan Poe ’s Masque of the Red Death who believed that crenel castle wall would protect them from the pestis without — are tardily realizing the cost of their complacency about infectious disease … The “ reglobalization ” of public health is well afoot , and the international politics of infectious disease control have return .
Have we made progress in the nearly 15 years since that essay was publish ? Clearly , not enough . The recent enterprisingness , launch by the United States in consultation with dozens of other commonwealth is theGlobal Health Security Agenda(GHSA)—a series of “ action packages ” that admit specific objective and indicators that can be used as a basis to valuate how national , regional and global health mental ability are developed and uphold over the long - term . In an feat to nourish committedness and provide answerableness , an sovereign guard dog will assess the forward motion of the initiative .
Meanwhile , in the day since the external conference was convened in Washington , the issue of Ebola cases has grown to nearly 7,500 .
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