Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
even before commercial air travel, the Spanish influenza managed to circumnavigate
the planet five times in 18 months. It would certainly take much less time for it to
wreak havoc world-wide today. Indeed, virtually any city in the United States today
can be reached by commercial flight within 36 hours, less than the incubation period
for most infectious diseases. as the distinction between domestic and international
public health is blurred, so is the difference between national and international
economy. the increasing linkage of economic entities by production, marketing,
and investment means that a disease-caused economic shock in china can be felt
immediately in other parts of the world. Since globalisation is a process integrating
not just markets but culture and governance, the impact will go beyond the economic
sectors and have important implications for sociopolitical and international stability.
other changes since 1918-19, such as population explosion, have made pandemic
influenza a greater threat, not a lesser one. Between 1918 and 2008, the world
population increased nearly four fold, from 1.8 billion to 6.7 billion. Meanwhile,
the percentage of population at risk for secondary infection caused by a pandemic
influenza is growing rapidly, as the population today includes more elderly and
more people with a weakened immune system (owing to aging, immunosuppressive
medication, and concurrent infections such as HIv infection) (osterholm 1996).
HIv/aIDS poses a particular challenge to mitigating the consequences of the
pandemic influenza. If a pandemic influenza arrives, it will be the first time for
humans to experience two pandemics at the same time. while still unsure of how
H5n1 will interact with the HIv virus, scientists speculate that because of the
immunosuppression associated with the infection, HIv-positive populations either
will be rapidly devastated or will serve as 'an ambulatory Petri dish', incubating
and possibly spreading new forms of the virus (Garrett 2005b). Such demographic
changes, coupled with urbanisation and exponential growth in foreign travel, have
made significantly more people vulnerable to the risks of infectious diseases,
including a influenza pandemic.
In sum, the world is different from that in 1918. while certain factors (e.g.,
increasing political commitment) could reduce the negative impact of the pandemic
influenza, other developments (e.g., lack of surge capacities, growing interdependence,
and population explosion) can make the influenza pandemic much more devastating
than ever before. In any case, the impact of the pandemic can still be considerably
lessened, provided that political leaders recognise the economic, sociopolitical,
and international threats that the pandemic poses and responds accordingly. the
remainder of this chapter will explore the implications of the pandemic influenza in
all these three dimensions.
Effect on World Economy
In
An Essay on the Principle of Population
, Malthus (1798) posited that disease
served as a 'positive check' of population growth by affecting food supply growth.
the role of disease as a great population regulator was demonstrated by the bubonic
