The Age of Pandemics - WSJ.com - The Diigo Meta page

• 12 May 09
  

  Jimmy Breeze

  disease health globalization trends future

  • The threat of deadly new viruses is on the rise due to population growth, climate change and increased contact between humans and animals. What the world needs to do to prepare.
• 04 May 09
  

  Wilhelm Schaser

  The threat of deadly new viruses is on the rise due to population growth, climate change and increased contact between humans and animals. Larry Brilliant on what the world needs to do to prepare." /><meta name="subsection" content="Business" /><meta name="section" content="Article" /><script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" charset="ISO-8859-1

  pandemics

• 02 May 09
  

  alexsoohoo
• 

  Tomislav Medak

  pandemics research

  • The technologies supporting bioterror have exploded even faster than computing power. The cost of genomic sequencing, as one example of a supporting technology, has gone down from the nearly $1 billion it cost for the first full human DNA sequences to the low thousands for consumers in the coming years. Genetic engineering of viruses is much less complex and far less expensive than sequencing human DNA. Bioterror weapons are cheap and do not need huge labs or government support. They are the poor man's WMD.

    
    

    Naturally occurring diseases with pandemic potential are much more ubiquitous and more certain to occur. Over the last decades, we have seen more than three dozen new infectious diseases appear, some of which could kill millions of people with one or two unlucky gene mutations or one or two unfavorable environmental changes. The risks of pandemics only increase as the human population grows, the world loses greenbelts, uninhabited land disappears and more humans hunt and eat wild animals.

  • Why are more new viruses with pandemic potential jumping from their traditional animal hosts to humans now? If I had to choose a single word answer it would be: "modernity." If I had two more words, I would add "human irresponsibility." And of course so much of this peril is made much worse by the Great Exacerbator -- climate change and global warming.
  • 3 more annotations...

  • • Increasingly, humans push every conceivable barrier, and we now occupy more land that was historically the province of animals then ever before. More humans come in contact with animals and their viruses because there is less rain forest, jungle and wild lands separating them. Partly driven by poverty and lack of access to other food sources, Africans last year consumed nearly 700 million wild animals, about two billion kilograms of "bush meat." Scientists like Nathan Wolfe of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative are taking matching blood specimens from the bush-meat hunters and the animals they kill, in an attempt to predict which virus will jump next.

      
      

      If sub-Saharan Africa is the hotspot for blood-borne diseases, the Mekong area bounded by China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia is the hotspot for respiratory diseases like SARS or pandemic bird flu. In these countries, the issue is not poverty but relative prosperity that has led to increased raising of cattle and chickens, and increased meat consumption. In China, the numbers of chickens raised for food has increased 1,000-fold over the past few decades. In parts of Southeast Asia, humans and chickens -- and pigs -- live so close together, exchanging viruses, it looks almost like a science experiment.

    • Smallpox killed 500 million people in the 20th century alone. The global smallpox program cost $150 million total in 1965 dollars; each year, in addition to lives saved from ending this terrible disease, the U.S. reaps economic benefits exceeding $2 billion from eliminating routine vaccination and the handful of very serious adverse consequences, including three or four vaccine-caused deaths, airport checkpoints (remember those little yellow cards?) and the loss of time away from work and school.
    • In analyzing the effect of loss of travel and trade in addition to the health-care costs of a possible bird-flu pandemic, Bank of Montreal chief economist Sherry Cooper estimated the global costs of a "mild" pandemic to be 2% of global GDP, which in 2005 dollars was $1.1 trillion. There is a stark contrast between savings in lives and treasure from investing in public health and prevention, increasing training programs, funding the research that leads to better vaccines, more lab capacity, improved antivirals and early warning systems -- and the human and economic costs of not acting in time. The business community should be at the front of the line, advocating for prevention and public health, one of the history's best investments by any criteria.
• 

  Terry Jones

  larry brilliant pandemics

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