Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
in these inter-institutional spaces as a watchdog providing oversight, facilitating
coordination and strategic linkages, ensuring accountability, and offering a critical
analysis of the nature of institution building.
the same holds true of institution building at the national level. Scrapping
institutions every time disaster strikes and starting from scratch is impractical. this
costly habit wastes human resources, erases institutional memory, and cheats public
expectations. Instead, existing institutions should be equipped to deal with any threat,
be it Y2K, September 11, flooding, a new infectious disease, or a biological attack.
The Global Agenda
Poverty and Ill Health: Breaking the Cycle
there would be far less cause for concern if medical capacity around the world were
adequate. Yet the capacity to respond to global threats is severely unbalanced, as
the state of global public health has reached crisis proportions (bradford and linn
2004). countries are nowhere near meeting the MDGs on health by 2015. Most
world governments lack sufficient funds to act. No national health infrastructure
today would be able to handle, at once, the combined burden of a pandemic, social
disruption, and ensuing public unrest, but the international community would still
look to the United States, canada, Japan, and the european Union for answers,
vaccines, cures, money, and hope (Garrett 2005a). So would their own citizens.
there is no easy solution to this crisis. but certain structural changes could help
mitigate its causes—and lessen the impact of avian influenza. Because it tends to
afflict those countries that lack the capacity to contain it, defeating the virus requires
US$34 per person per year were allotted to health care, education, and sanitation,
8 million lives could be saved every year by 2010—with direct and indirect economic
benefits totalling US$360 billion annually (Commission on Macroeconomics and
Health 2001).
but public health systems in rich countries have also come under strain. the
anthrax scare in the U.S. in 2001 underscored the inability of federal and local health
agencies to respond effectively either to bioterrorism or epidemic threats (Garrett
2005a). because of budget cuts in recent years, one of the greatest weaknesses that
each country must address is the inability of its hospitals to deal with a sudden surge
of patients.
the historically unprecedented HPaI outbreaks in southeast asia's poultry
industry in 2004 also revealed a direct correlation between national intervention
capacity and industrial practices on the one hand and viral spread on the other. Japan
and Korea fared best, because the disease remained limited to commercial farms, and
was rapidly detected and hence effectively contained. control measures were less
successful in thailand and Vietnam, where nearly every household kept a flock
of intermingling chickens and ducks. cambodia and laos were even worse off,
