New Illness Emerging at Unprecedented Rates

New Illness Emerging at Unprecedented Rates



Aug. 2007  - New forms of illness are 
emerging at an unprecedented rate often with the ability to cross borders 
rapidly and spread in an increasingly interconnected world, the United 
Nations health agency warned in its annual report today. 
"Given today's universal vulnerability to these threats, better security 
calls for global solidarity," said Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of 
the World Health Organization, WHO. "International public health security 
is both a collective aspiration and a mutual responsibility. The new 
watchwords are diplomacy, cooperation, transparency and preparedness."

World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan  
Since 1967, at least 39 new pathogens have been identified, including HIV, 
Ebola haemorrhagic fever, Marburg fever and SARS, which emerged in China 
in 2003 and spread rapidly as far as Canada, infecting more than 8,000 
people, over 800 of them fatally, before it was brought under control. 
Today's highly mobile human society is a central reason why diseases 
spread more quickly today than ever before. Airlines now carry more than 
two billion passengers a year, enabling people and the diseases that 
travel with them to pass from one country to another in a matter of hours. 

The potential health and economic impact was seen in 2003 with SARS, which 
cost Asian countries an estimated US$60 billion of gross expenditure and 
business losses. 
New health threats have also emerged, linked to potential terrorist 
attacks, chemical incidents and radionuclear accidents. 
Since 1951, when WHO issued its first set of legally binding regulations 
aimed at preventing the international spread of disease, "Dependence on 
chemicals has increased, as has awareness of the potential hazards for 
health and the environment," said Dr. Chan.
 
"Industrialization of food production and processing, and globalization of 
marketing and distribution mean that a single tainted ingredient can lead 
to the recall of tons of food items from scores of countries," she said. 
"In a particularly ominous trend, mainstay antimicrobials are failing at a 
rate that outpaces the development of replacement drugs." 
Other older threats, such as pandemic influenza, malaria and tuberculosis, 
continue to pose a threat to public health through a combination of 
mutation, rising resistance to antimicrobial medicines and weak health 
systems, Chan said. 
The report, "A safer future: global public health security in the 21st 
century," calls pandemic influenza the most feared threat to health 
security in our times. Experts worry that the current bird flu virus, 
which has so far infected 321 people, killing 194 of them, could mutate to 
a form that lends itself to easy human-to-human transmission. 
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920, which spread easily between humans, 
is estimated to have killed from 20 million to 40 million people. The 
experts say a new flu pandemic is not a question of if but of when.

The report sets out the WHO strategic action plan to respond to a 
pandemic, draws attention to the need for stronger health systems and for 
continued vigilance in managing the risks and consequences of the 
international spread of polio and the newly emerging strain of extensively 
drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB). 
Some of the human factors behind public health insecurity include 
inadequate investment in public health resulting from a false sense of 
security in the absence of infectious disease outbreaks. 
There are disruptive unexpected policy changes, such as a decision 
temporarily to halt polio immunization in northern Nigeria in 2003, which 
led to the re-emergence of polio cases; and conflicts where forced 
migration obliges people to live in overcrowded, unhygienic and 
impoverished conditions, heightening the risk of epidemics. 
Other factors include microbial evolution and antibiotic resistance as 
well as animal husbandry and food processing threats such as the human 
form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, and Nipah virus, discovered 
in 1999. Named after the location where it was first detected in Malaysia, 
this virus has caused disease in animals and in humans, through contact 
with infectious animals. 
The WHO report recommends include global cooperation in surveillance and 
outbreak alert and response; open sharing of knowledge, technologies and 
materials, including viruses and other laboratory samples, necessary to 
optimize secure global public health; and global responsibility for 
capacity building within the public health infrastructure of all 
countries. 
In a departure from past strategies, WHO's revised International Health 
Regulations of 2005 moves away from a focus on passive barriers at 
borders, airports and seaports to a strategy of proactive risk management.
This strategy aims to detect a problem in the earliest possible stage and 
stop it at the source - before it has a chance to become an international 
threat. 

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