Sunday, May 8, 2011

Globalization of Disease

The recent outbreak of cholera in Haiti highlights the global connections of disease, as discussed in this article by the bbc.

The links of this disease to South Asian strains of cholera displays how inter-connected the world is. With increasing technological advances, the world is not as isolated from disease as it once was; it's becoming increasingly easier for diseases to spread across continents and borders. I think this example presents how important it is for developed countries to pay attention to the burden of disease in developing countries. While it's a success for those of us in the developed sphere to eradicate certain diseases, if we ignore the plights of the "3rd world" then these diseases can easily be re-introduced into our populations. What we're seeing in Haiti is that this re-introduced disease is actually more virulent than before due to reduced immunization and resistance in the population of Haiti (given that the country had eradicated cholera before).

The recent outbreak of cholera in Haiti also shows that the international community needs to be much more careful in watching the flow of people and disease. Clearly lax approaches regarding oversight of disease allowed cholera to spread form Asia to Haiti. While I think it would be wrong to quarantine areas of the world, I do think certain restrictions should be placed on the movement of people in and out of certain areas - at least ensuring that people who do leave the area do not have the disease, and that people entering the area have proper resistance. In the case of extremely contagious disease this should be vital. Incidents like this should remind us that with an increasingly-connected global community, we should learn to be mindful of our neighbors who suffer from communicable disease not just as a matter of social justice, but also for the benefit within our environs.

1 comment:

  1. I think you bring up some important points in this post. One of those points is the spread of disease due to globalization, a topic that has been frequently brought up in class. Because the world is shrinking in size due to rapidly expanding markets and the ever-faster means of transportation, it would be foolish for developed countries to ignore issues such as these. As Americans, we are in closer contact with the rest of the world than ever before, and new, resistant strains of any disease in another country becomes an instant threat to our nation's health. This leads to the overall theme of the mock World Health Organization discussion in class - should we prioritize the elimination of these diseases instead of others? Are they just as dangerous?

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