World Faces Threat From New Deadly Diseases As Scientists Struggle To Keep Up, Say Experts
· Infectious illness spreads at fastest rate in history
· WHO calls for worldwide effort to avoid pandemics
The world will face a new deadly threat on the scale of Aids, Sars and Ebola within a decade, the world’s leading authority on health said yesterday, as it warned that diseases were spreading more quickly than at any time in history.New diseases are emerging at an unprecedented rate, of one a year, and are becoming more difficult to treat, says the World Health Organisation’s annual report. It paints a bleak picture of future health threats, with science struggling to keep up as diseases increasingly become drug resistant.
The authors point to passenger flights, now numbering more than 2bn a year, as being a chillingly efficient mechanism for spreading diseases rapidly across continents. New diseases that pose a sudden threat in one part of the world are only “a few hours away” from becoming a threat somewhere else, the WHO says.
“Profound changes have occurred in the way humanity inhabits the planet,” said Margaret Chan, the director general of the WHO. “The disease situation is anything but stable. Population growth, incursion into previously uninhabited areas, rapid urbanisation, intensive farming practices, environmental degradation, and the misuse of anti-microbials, have disrupted the equilibrium of the microbial world. The rate of emergence of new diseases, at one year, was “historically unprecedented”.
The report, A Safer Future, identifies 40 diseases unknown a generation ago, and reveals that during the past five years the WHO has verified more than 1,100 epidemic events worldwide. It says:
· Cholera, yellow fever and epidemic meningococcal diseases made a comeback in the last quarter of the 20th century.
· Severe acute respiratory syndrome and avian influenza in humans still have the potential to wreak havoc globally.
· Viral diseases such as Ebola, Marburg haemorrhagic fever and Nipah virus, pose threats to global public health security.
· The use of smallpox in bioterrorism is a particularly worrying threat. Authorities around the world should work together to combat the kind of bioterrorism that occurred with the letters warning of anthrax after September 11 2001.
· A flu pandemic would affect more than 1.5 billion people, or 25% of the world’s population. Even if the disease were mild in itself the economic and social disruption would be “enormous”.
The WHO report adds: “It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like Aids, another Ebola, or another Sars, sooner or later.”
To prepare for these events will take unprecedented global and political collaboration, it advises. “No single country, however capable, wealthy or technologically advanced, can alone prevent, detect and respond to all public health threats.” The organisation is calling for renewed international efforts to share information.
The UK’s Department of Health said it strongly supported “the approach of managing these risks through cooperation”.
Worries about the effects of international travel were underscored in June when an American national, Andrew Speaker, 31, who had a contagious and deadly strain of tuberculosis, took an international flight. US authorities tracked every passenger who had shared one of two transatlantic flights with Mr Speaker, who had fallen ill with the drug-resistant XDR form of TB while on honeymoon in Europe. He went back home via Montreal to avoid the US authorities, who had ordered him into quarantine, and would not have allowed him to fly, he believed.
In South Africa, the courts have considered forcibly detaining people who have the same form of TB to prevent its spread, amid fears that many more than those officially diagnosed are suffering and have not informed the authorities. The XDR strain of TB is a highly infectious disease spread by airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks. Experts believe it emerged after inappropriate and overuse of antibiotics to treat TB.
Scariest pandemic? Cheney/Bush syndrome.
The eerie part is that we’ll never quite know whether it was natural or deliberate if it does strike — and all the outward appearances of martial law are put into place.
Two thoughts.
After the Anthrax letter, there was a frantic search for the perpetrator, then a couple of small notices in the papers that the strain had been identified as a US strain, created in one of our own (by treaty, non-existent bio-weapon) labs. The search then dried up and we heard no more about it.
Remember the Halliburton/KBR Concentration Camps? You, too, could be infected with the Protester/Critic virus and should be quarantined for the good of the regime.
Hmmm,
Several years back in this regime a public health administrator from a former communist country warned me of the manufactured diseases and a bill that passed at least in the House, granting the federal government the legal ability to deem anyone a public health risk by diagnosis of any given public health threat and quarantine them indefinitely and subject them to manditory treatment. (It was suggested that this could also include the eliimination of wildlife if deemed a public health concern-like the bison of Yellowstone and the brucella abortis argument.
Then the conversation went on to warn about the fact that Rumsfeld, among others (Frist comes to mind), were CEO’s and the like of big pharma’s that have no-bid contracts to develop “vaccines” for all these upcoming public health threats.
The ulgliness just goes on and on.
Since we can’t seem to control populuation growth with “abstainance only” and other ideological driven programs, maybe a pandemic is what we are opting for. It is a shame, because the money we wasted on NASA space projects, star wars and wars in Vietnam and Iraq could have stopped the populaton explosion. However, that was too rational an approach—lets just overpopulate and destroy ourselves and the planet all the while being so religious and nationalistic. It’s the human way.
How do you think they plan to take care of over population and the attendent water, food and petroleum shortages? Nothing quite as efficient as a good bio-weapon, with the counter measures reserved for those who are deemed to have some value to society. Eugenics, my friends…
Another reason why air travel should be banned.
Very interesting that they do not mention global warming as one of the causes of this increase in infectious diseases. Many medical experts who are familiar with the likely effects of global warming have been predicting exactly this type of increase, in more or less this time frame, for a number of years now.
Oh my god, i thought my computer went to a “fear-mongering” neocom site with this story. What new diseases are they talking about? Bird-flu, S.A.R.S. E.Bola? Remember back in the 1990’s when everyone was going to die from AIDS? Well what do you know, it didn’t happen. BUT WAIT. Before you all pounce all over me. I’m going to accept every word from this report. But here’s the weird thing, I’m 38 and I went to college in San Francisco. And me and my friends are still alive. Sure I met people who had AIDS, curiously not alot, we didn’t as a whole practice safe sex. So now, I’m suppose to get all worried about bird flu, and the other exotic illnesses. Well, I don’t want to add to the impending Armageddons that face this world; but I recently read that there is new killer, that we should fear. And yes, its spread via air travel, and of course yes global warming does have something to do with it. They call it “cancer”. But it’s probably just a conspiracy.
They could set up Ellis islands at airports to check people coming into the country.
But they are probablly too busy checking the eldely for concealed terrorist weapons.
MY gosh Damon13, do you get paid by the neo-cons for writing your comments? Maybe you are just extremely ignorant, how about some Bible quotes, or maybe just come right out and write that you’re a far right Bushie lover who is enamored with Rush Limbaugh. You are humerous though and fun to read. If you are just ignorant or stupid, we forgive you.
I understnad stupidity, I’m mot very bright either. Of course I can see things happening with my own eyes and know what Bush has done and what he is capable of,__ damn near anything!___ Scary.
Never fear, my children, your government is on the job!
For example, since 2004, the U.S. government has prohibited the Dutch INTERVET company from selling avian vaccines to Cuba, alleging that they contain an antigen produced in the United States.
If an outbreak of avian influenza occurs in Cuba, you will still be protected by the vast 90-mile expanse of the Straits of Georgia.
Damon13:
You are spot on. My aunt died of lung cancer and she didn’t smoke.
Q.E.D.
As a nurse for 1/4 century, I can assure you that the situation is much worse than is being stated. Infectious diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Cassandra, didn’t you percieve Damon13 was being sarcastic. Read his posts on other strings also. He’s a big time troll.
DU is causing may cancers, especially in children, also autism is becomeng epidemic, DU causes that by altered DNA in the male sperm.
Safiyyah, you are absolutely correct.
Cassandra
Smoking is not the only cause of lung cancer. Smoking increases the likelihood, (which is basically determined by the individual’s innate susceptiblities), that the smoker will develop lung cancer. It does not guarantee it.
Not smoking reduces the likelihood that the non-smoker will develop lung cancer. It does not confer immunity.
Your understanding of such links is obviously flawed. Quod erat demonstratum.
Thanks Cassandra, you made my lazy, fat as all hell, ass feel much better with the knowledge that the government is looking out for me and my cholesterol and won’t sell McDs’ and won’t sell me my twinkies anymore as my insurance goes up and up and the M.R.S.A staph infection on my twenty rolls of fat under my arms grows farther into my ass crack. I’m so glad they care. So,…my kids go to school with yours and they are in your kids class! Isn’t that nice! They are in gym class together…
“I guess 90 miles is just way to far for a little birdie to fly, its wings must get so tired!”(spoken with your crazy aunts intonations)
Where do these people come from? I watched one girl get MRSA and then it went to at least twenty of the people around her, kids too, hers and all the neighbors, at school, work, everywhere. All that infected flesh…pounds were removed from her ass alone! Not to mention her….
Hey, with good diseases, housing will be cheap!
to think that is the truth too…..Iew!
(not housing)
“The report, A Safer Future, identifies 40 diseases unknown a generation ago, and reveals that during the past five years the WHO has verified more than 1,100 epidemic events worldwide”
Didn’t they read Meghan Daum’s Death by Numbers?
3500 Automobile deaths each month, and where’s the safety reform?
42,000 cancer deaths per month, and where’s the health care reform?
Someone dies of cardiovascular disease every 36 seconds … and what?
“the diseases and the car wrecks that kill thousands of us every day are so common that they’re the opposite of news.”
Nope. We need new and exciting diseases to worry about.
If your car wasn’t so “safe” it wouldn’t waste so much gas! Your Uzi weighs a ton! They care only if they can sell it to you!
“Andrew Speaker, 31, who had a contagious and deadly strain of tuberculosis,” turned out not to have the kind of TB the CDC claimed. He had a much less resistant strain and has had part of one lung removed to treat the problem plus antibiotics. This was a huge scare created on shaky facts. Not the first time nor the last!
“I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle, children going to school, and suddenly they become vague and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched, in the darkness of the night.” H.G.Wells
Paul Bramscher 2:57 pm:
“The eerie part is that we’ll never quite know whether it was natural or deliberate if it does strike. . .”
Maybe, but we’ll figure out someone to bomb anyway. Otherwise, god forbid, we’d lose “credibility.”
We live in mythological times. The primary myth is that myth does not apply to us - only to those that must be dominated. We are dominated from the outside, dominant from within. The world’s religions are maps to an interior threshold inacessible by dominance paradigms dependent on fear of death not of ‘other’- only of a mythological cartesian ’self’.
In the eighteenth century Carl von Linee referred to the Guarani indians as “primus verus systematicus” for their intellectual contributions to biological sciences. Medical dictionaries still contain etymological references to the language.
In 2000 anthropologists affirmed that the culture remains ‘cognitively’and ’symbolically’intact. The UN has called for recognition of genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil. Not a peep in the US press.
We are conditioned in a subtle way to look east-west, not north-south. We have a lexicon speaking of the old world, the new world the third world. To the Guarani their traditional territory is with the first world in which their entire being is an integral part. Without ‘tekoha’(the traditonal migratory territory) there is no ‘teko’(way of being traditional) If you think about it - in order to sustain this an individual within this living context is by nature the penultimate teacher, no?
Our problem is that we are conditioned not to be students.
A Brazilian ethnograper recently wrote that we need to very quickly become aware of the fact that the “content” of knowledge of indigenous peoples is not something that can be separated from the “form”. It does not need to be written because it is lived and transmitted orally in quotidian practice. It thus sustains a ‘religious’ dimension that contains an immunity to the disease of projection and domination assimilated by occidental societies that have institutionalized.
What does it mean if a people is forced to write what has been sustained by not writing? It is an integrated science that western science is as yet unable to fully recognize much less access other than ‘acquiring’ aspects of the content. It is treated as an issue of intellectual property rights where it needs to be a recognition of the form by which it is sustained.
A Brazilian theologian noted that the theologies and sciences of egalitarian societies are by nature different from accquisitive and dominant societies. The myths sustain an unbroken thread constantly being regenerated in rebalancing from incursion and faced with the banalities of the market paradigm which also demands that indigenous peoples be regarded as ‘myth’ by claiming that because they do not reflect the ‘historical’ image of the feather and bow and arrow are thus ‘acculturated’and/or ‘assimilated’. Europeans no longer wear tri-cornered hats. When they do, think of the context within which that occurs.
Learning modalities are a relatively recent perspective in western education. Traditionally agraphic peoples have always known, exercised and sustained mutiple modalities.
The myth of ‘magic’ in shamanic medicine includes a rhetorical paradigm in which social consensus of well-being based in quotidian praxis contributes to health maintenance in ways we generally deny yet also practice. We are conditioned by market forces to ignore, deny and not learn from these.
You can have a ‘band-aid’ (…ahem) of phytopharmacological ‘fair trade’ marketing of certain remedies, but that does little to sustain a people who seek freedom from forces of acquisitiveness and market constipation of originary integration with the ‘first world’. The mythical veil over the poverty of material wealth begins to crumble.
In the words of the song by the late great musician Les McCann ” …Posession is the motivation that is hanging up the goddamn nation, looks like we always end up in a rut… trying to make it real compared to what?…” (on ‘Live at Montreaux’, late 20th century)
What is the answer? It resides in your own way of being and represents a great frontier of exploration. Take the energy of ‘manifest destiny’ and apply it in a new/old timeless non-violent paradigm. Let go of the mimetic violence and embrace the normative rather than the norm.
By: margalo
“Andrew Speaker, 31, who had a contagious and deadly strain of tuberculosis,” turned out not to have the kind of TB the CDC claimed. He had a much less resistant strain and has had part of one lung removed to treat the problem plus antibiotics. This was a huge scare created on shaky facts. Not the first time nor the last!
Yep, I caught the same story. And figured it to be so from the initial reports. Come on, I mean what doctor is going to allow a patient with such a deadly contagious illness back out into public? A lot of doctors are so scared to give out pain killers these days in fear of loosing their license. But they’ll let something like this get back into the population!?! Someone in government (my bet) had a hair up their ass towards this guy.
This may give those who back nuclear power a good reason to rethink that option. Not to mention the dust from ammunition now contaminated with depleted uranium or radioactive commodities being blown across the world. I read a report some time ago this crap is altering the dna of people/soldiers that have been infected by it. Mixed with improper waste practices from the plants, who knows what this crap is creating. Global warming? Most space rocks landing in the northern hemisphere that might bring in new species of life/cells/diseases now have a better/easier environment to survive/manifest in. Also mixed with the above? hmmm
Yeah, and the “Strecker” memorandum that stated the US created the aids virus with a long and well written bibliography. From a few viruses that would do the same thing as aids does if they where combined. Look to your hearts content on that, I had a dozen copies made once but they all disappeared out of my house one night. Who knows? The Berkley folk should be able to find a lead on that. John Strecker and his brother toured with that memorandum in cali. early 80s’. He was assassinated.
None of this bodes well for us you know.
It is hard to believe that Common Dreams readers seem as willfully ignorant of the emerging problem with controlling infectious disease as so many of the posters comments reflect? But alas, it appears to be so.
Infectious diseases cross national borders quite easily, and much of the world lives in poverty and squalor struggling with war and oppression. Dump on loads of antibiotics into both common animals and humans in the most sporadic and thoughtless manner and the entire planet has become one giant laboratory for producing run away disease.
Microbes evolve much faster than human thought as this discussion here on Common Dreams underlines.