As globalization and the movement of people across borders quickly continues to grow so does the threat of global health. With the movement of people comes the movement of bacteria and infectious diseases. Most recently students from King’s-Edgehill School in Nova Scotia and St Francis School in New York have come down with what they are calling the Swine Flu. Students contracted the symptoms after visiting Mexico on a spring break trip. People can travel very quickly in and out of countries, which, is greatly contributed to globalization. Although there is a lot of positives to globalization there is another side. As mentioned above with the movement of people very rapidly comes the possibility of infections. There are millions of people that deal travel internationally on frequent bases, making it extremely easy for a possible pandemic to take place with a quick transmission time.
However, on the other end of the spectrum globalization can play a key part in hopefully battling the spread of the infections flu. Communication has been a major development during the time of globalization. Large amounts of information can be sent and received very rapidly. With this tool it is possible to maintain an open form of communication for government to work together to suppress this possible outbreak of the flu. In a passing conversation I heard someone mention that the United States must help their allies in providing tamiflu, but in this case I think it is necessary for governments to put aside their political agendas and work together. It is also important that governments a forth coming with information and communicate what information they do have. If this isn’t done then it could become very similar to the SARS outbreak in China a couple summers ago, where no one really knew what was going on, because China was in the running for a possible Olympic bid for Beijing.
One of the scariest thing that this flu could do is put us in an even more economic trouble. There was an article from abcnews.com where they predicted what this flu could do to various economies. The figures were based on the 1918 pandemic mode and the results states 80% drop in demand for arts, recreation, accommodation, and food services. 67% drop in the demand for transportation, a 10% loss in agriculture, mining, construction, retail trade, and finance. However there would be a 15% increase in the demand for healthcare and social assistance. If this is applied all across the board to various cases that see the flu emerging in different cases then it could cause a serious dent in the world economy. Not to mention if boarders begin to shut down, like they did in Mexico and the United States. If more boarder were to be shut down it could really hind trade and business because so many markets are international and rely upon one another in he world of globalization.
If this flu progresses into a large scale pandemic we are not only going to have a large-scale health problem, but in addition to that it could jeopardize many world economies. It is clear that countries must work together to help prevent lives from being lost, but also to make sure the global economy does not fall even more downward with this threat of a pandemic.
The Global Flu
By bleedingheart - Posted on May 26th, 2009
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My grandmother was born in 1902 on Blackbeard Island which is off the coast of Georgia. Her father was a Doctor and he was a health inspectory there. (He later went on to become Surgeon General of the USA.) Blackbeard Island served a similar role to Ellis Island except that instead of being for quarantining immigrants who might carry diseases it was for quarantining sailors and commercial travelors.In those days, lacking modern medicines, it was deemed very important that potentially sick people not be allowed to enter the country and mingle with the population until after they had been quarantined for a few days to make sure any diseases they might be carrying had an opportunity to inncubate so they could be detected. The parrticular focus of Blackbeard Island was to detect and sanitize to prevent outbreaks of Yellow Fever. It was decommissioned in 1909 after a vaccine was developed which virtually eliminated Yellow Fever. By then my Grandmother was living with her parents on a ship in Tokyo Harbor where he was also a health inspector.
Blackbeard Island
Hugh Smith Cumming - my great-grandfather
In this country we used to take disease much more seriously then we do now and our methods were pretty harsh and very effective. We stamped out completely polio, yellow fever, tuberculosis, small pox, leprosy and several others.
Our success and the amazing miracle of modern medicine has left us complacent and I believe in a dangerous position. Our recent very weak response to the Mexican Flu and our only slightly better response to the much more deadly SARS leaves me worried that we are cruising for a healthcare crisis. Our government seems to lack the will to take the measures necessary to protect our health. Diseases like tuberculosis that had been completely erradicated are making a comeback and are largely being imported by illegal immigrants to which our government's response has been pathetically weak even as the disease has in some cases spread through entire school systems.
And to make matters worse, the diseases are becoming increasingly resistant to our strongest drugs. We are breeding super-bugs and they are getting more virulent even as our ability to create new drugs to fight them seems to slow.
I would not be surprised to see a healthcare crisis. Sooner or later I bet we get a new bug that has Malthusian consequences for the human population. And I would not be surprised to see a return to more primitive methods of preventing the spread of infectious diseases like Blackbeard island.
We're about due for a pandemic. It wouldn't take much with the globalization we have, thus just about anything can become a pandemic. But, you know what? We overreacted to the swine flu. Only 100-200 or so people have died from this outbreak, out of over 13,000 confirmed cases. That's about a 1% mortality, higher than the normal mortality during flu season (0.1%), but much less than the mortality of the 1918 pandemic (10-20%).
Why wasn't it so severe? Well, a good candidate is that people actually took the time to wash their hands and adopt cleanliness practices they should have been doing all along. Tamiflu was a great treatment for it as well.
This is why it's better to err on the side of caution. The US government responded quickly to the threat, and while thousands of people did get sick, few died. Why should you get the flu vaccine every year? So you're protected against the strains that are deemed most common in the particular year. But even if the vaccine isn't very effective, you still get that immunity and keep it for a long time (assuming you have a spleen).
~C
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Because it isn’t strong enough yet, most probably this virus of swine flu will organize itself on the background in order to hit full force on a global scale in September/October of this year.
Since most amongst are dwelling with health issues, fears, bad diets and stress, many will be vulnerable when this shit hits the fan on its return!
http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html
:-(
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