Health and human security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 165

around 30 cases on average per 100,000 of the population at the beginning
of the 1990s, the rate rose dramatically towards the end of the decade, reach-
ing approximately 80 cases per 100,000 people. The HIV figures reflected
even greater infection levels, rising steeply towards the end of the 1990s,
and prompted dramatic statements from Western medical experts and news
agencies . 3 While reported cases per million of the population were just below
25 in mid-1997, a disturbing 130 cases per million of the population were
recorded by the end of 1999. It is now estimated that the rate of HIV preva-
lence in the region of the former Soviet Union (Russia, Eastern Europe and
Central Asia) has increased by 250 per cent (UNAIDS 2011). While serious,
the situation was less dramatic in the Baltic states. In Estonia, the number
of tuberculosis cases was relatively low, but the country suffered an outbreak
of HIV among injecting drug users in 2000. The situation in Latvia paral-
leled that of Russia for both tuberculosis and HIV. In Lithuania, although the
tuberculosis rates reached those of Russia and Latvia, the HIV rate remained
as low as Sweden's, on the Western shores of the Baltic Sea.
The entire situation was deemed unacceptable by Western experts, par-
ticularly the emergence of a multi-drug resistant tuberculosis strain that was
caused by insufficient or interrupted treatment of ordinary tuberculosis. Terms
like 'worst-case scenario' and 'unprecedented public health risk' were used , 4
as were terms like 'katastroika' and 'mortality crisis'. The worried Western
community emphasized the correspondence between economic recession and
high tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS incidence in the former Soviet areas. It was
claimed that the social disruption could threaten the Eastern part of the Baltic
Sea region and might destabilize the area not only socially, but politically,
too. It was assumed that the health crisis would damage inter-state relations
in the Eastern areas of the region. In the absence of basic security in terms of
human health, it was said, basic security in the wider social and political sense
could not be achieved. Arguments such as these both informed and motivated
the international effort to combat the spread of communicable diseases in the
Northwest of Russia. Thus, the rhetorical style of the Task Force initiative
clearly demonstrates the emphasis on a 'soft security' approach, and illustrates
that the language of human security has already been adopted in some situa-
tions in the Arctic.
What, then, was to be done to reduce the spread of communicable diseases
in the region? The traditional method of preventing the cross-border spread
of infectious diseases is to enforce a strict quarantine regime in combination
with an equally strict medical screening at national borders. But as nation
states become increasingly reliant on commercial and cultural interaction in
the process of globalization, these methods have lost much of their appeal.
Specifically, the post-Cold War ambition of encouraging rather than discour-
aging cross-border contact in the European North rendered border control
measures both impractical and ideologically unacceptable . 5