Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the face of a major campaign to eradicate it shows how difficult it is to produce a
success such as smallpox in today's world. In 2006, a year after the target year for
polio's eradication from the planet, 676 new cases sprung up in India (Global Polio
eradication Initiative 2008). nigeria had more than 1122 cases in the same year.
tobacco-related diseases constitute an attrition case that has been spreading,
as more people on the planet smoke and contract the predictable conditions that
smoking brings. the causes, pathways, and predictable results are known with a
high degree of certainty, as are the measures for the control of tobacco. It is fully
under the control of the individuals it harms and who harm others with second-hand
smoke. But despite high degrees of scientific certainty and human control, the global
tobacco pandemic grows.
each of these cases poses a major challenge. Some have and could overwhelm
the capacity of even the most capable state to control. but taken together along with
the many other new diseases, there is great uncertainty about which will erupt as the
greatest threat and thus demand the most resources in response. Moreover, the world
now faces the ominous possibility of having to combat two pandemics at once.
Source
the novelty of the 21st-century health challenge starts at the source of these diseases.
The chapters in this volume confirm that there has been a shift disease. Long gone
are the cold war decades in which the world's major powers developed, deployed,
and prepared to use or defend themselves against bioweapons. In their place has
arisen the use of bioweapons by non-state human actors, such as the anthrax attacks
in america in the autumn of 2001. as Price-Smith and Huang indicate, the end of the
cold war closed the era when powerful states deliberately developed and deployed
biological weapons for use against the opposing military or civilian populations of
state adversaries in the inter-state competitions and wars of old. but the post-cold
war period brought bioterrorism, with human actors using disease for apparently
political purposes too. Human are also the source of the diseases they inflict on
themselves, their partners, and their neighbours, as the cases of HIv/aIDS and
smoking suggest. but threats arising from animals and birds and passing into humans
are also a compelling threat. carolyn bennett notes that an estimated 80 percent of
new and emerging diseases originate in these non-human sources.
the SARS coronavirus is a new zoonotic pathogen that moved from its animal
reservoir in civet cats in china into humans. Influenza also started in birds or swine
or a different animal and crossed to humans, with the next stage of human-to-
human transmission threatening to come soon. the 1918 influenza pandemic came
completely from avian sources. those sources act as a reservoir that give today's
avian influenza enormous staying power, making eradication difficult, despite the
short-lived success in Hong Kong when it appeared in chickens there. H5n1 is now
endemic in southeast Asia. Avian influenza is more contagious and virulent than
SarS and can be spread by asymptomatic carriers. and, in all cases, pathogens
mutate and beat the immunisation deployed as a human defence.
