Deadly diseases spreading faster worldwide with boom in air travel

26 August 2007

People around world are at greater risk of contracting potentially lethal infectious diseases because of the boom in international air travel.

An estimated 2.1 billion people traveled by flight worldwide in 2006 alone.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that new diseases are emerging at the “historically unprecedented rate of one per year” and failures in international cooperation are putting lives at risk.

Centuries-old threats such as influenza, malaria, and tuberculosis are thriving due to mutations and rising resistance, while deadly new diseases threaten to cause worldwide epidemics, WHO says in its latest report.

According to the report, “today’s highly mobile, interdependent and interconnected world provides myriad opportunities for the rapid spread of infectious diseases, and radio-nuclear and toxic threats. An outbreak or epidemic in any one part of the world is only a few hours away from becoming an imminent threat somewhere else.”

The WHO is calling on countries to report potentially dangerous health emergencies more quickly, and be more willing to share scientific knowledge of new infections.

The report highlighted two recent failures of international intelligence-sharing that could have put lives at risk.

Earlier in 2007, American officials tracked the movements of a US lawyer believed to have a highly dangerous form of tuberculosis as he travelled around Europe, but failed to inform the WHO or the countries he visited.

As a result, 127 people were exposed to the man on two trans-Atlantic flights. Eventually, it was confirmed that he had a less serious form of the disease.

The second instance is an on-going row with Indonesia over the country’s failure to provide samples of the H5N1 bird flu to the WHO to help develop a vaccine for the disease. The government of Indonesia has instead signed deals with pharmaceutical firms to send them the samples in return for cheap access to any resulting drugs.

China stopped sharing specimens with WHO for almost a year before finally sending samples in June 2007, while Vietnam said it sent samples but has encountered shipping obstacles.

While the governments of WHO’s 193 member-states would ideally be the first source of information in any outbreak, that is often not the case. Nearly half of all of WHO’s outbreak alerts come from the media and are then followed up by affected countries.

No single country, however capable, wealthy or technologically advanced, can alone prevent, detect, and respond to all public health threats, the WHO report warns.

The report titled A Safer Future says there have been over 1,100 outbreaks of infectious diseases – including cholera, polio, and bird flu – over the last five years.

There are 39 new pathogens that were unknown a generation ago, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and SARS.

“It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like AIDS, another Ebola, another SARS, sooner or later,” the report has warned.

In 1951, when WHO issued its first set of health regulations to prevent the international spread of diseases, the situation was stable, the report said. People then traveled internationally by ship, slowing the spread of diseases around the world and new diseases were rare.

But today, high volumes of people can quickly travel worldwide, meaning that an outbreak or epidemic in any part of the planet is only a few hours away from becoming an imminent threat somewhere else.