From a fascinating series of articles in this month's Foreign Affairs. Tip of the hat to Dan Drezner's blog.
Foreign Affairs - Preparing for the Next Pandemic - Michael T. Osterholm: "Widespread infection and economic collapse can destabilize a government; blame for failing to deal effectively with a pandemic can cripple a government. This holds even more for an influenza pandemic. In the event of a pandemic influenza, the level of panic witnessed during the SARS crisis could spiral out of control as illnesses and deaths continued to mount over months and months. Unfortunately, the public is often indifferent to initial warnings about impending infectious-disease crises -- as with HIV, for example. Indifference becomes fear only after the catastrophe hits, when it is already too late to implement preventive or control measures."
1 year ago
1 comment:
People have been up in arms about the possibility of an influenza pandemic for awhile. Barak Obama and whoever's the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs (a midwestern republican, forget his name) had an editorial in the NY Times maybe a month ago regarding this possibility and that the US needs to put more effort into prevention, both at home and abroad. We in the US are haven't had to worry about alot of infectious diseases in awhile (eg. polio, malaria, yellow fever, cholera, TB, etc). However these (and other new threats) continue to brew in the underdeveloped world, including Africa, Asia, etc. Old threats can and will re-emerge as long as we continue to view anything outside our borders as someone else's problem (i.e. HIV in Africa and now Asia, many things in Russia but particularly TB - esp. among the prison population).
Even in the US, we have growing problems with things such as Hepatitus (not airborne, but easily spread through shared needles, bleeding, exposure to bodily fluids). In New Jersey prisons, it has reached epidemic levels. The true extent of infection is unknown, as the state refuses to test all inmates. It's a situation seen all over the world: a disease spreads fairly readily in a crowded prison. Even if there's the will, adequate money, resources, and staff for treatment don't exist - so many inmates are untreated. Even those who receive some treatment may not recover or be fully treated before release. With release from the prison system, the disease both the treated and untreated ex-cons suffer from gets introduced the the population at large.
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