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By ERICA BULMAN
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 22, 2007; 7:06 PM GENEVA -- With an estimated 2.1 billion airline passengers roaming the
planet last year alone, infectious diseases are spreading faster than
ever before, the U.N. health agency said Thursday.
The World Health Organization called on governments to follow its
revised regulations for fighting dangerous health crises. "New diseases are emerging at the historically unprecedented rate of one
per year," WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said in an
introduction to the annual World Health Report. "It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will
not be another disease like AIDS, another Ebola, or another SARS, sooner
or later," the report said. The thrust of WHO's efforts to protect global health has been the
revision of the International Health Regulations, which came into effect
in June. The voluntary regulations govern how countries should report
potentially dangerous health emergencies to WHO. While the regulations are meant to improve disease reporting worldwide,
it is uncertain how much influence they actually have. For example,
American officials earlier this year anxiously tracked the European
whereabouts of a U.S. lawyer believed to have a highly dangerous form of
tuberculosis. International officials eventually identified the roughly 127 people
thought to have been exposed to his illness during two trans-Atlantic
flights. But it was only after he had left Europe that U.S. officials
informed WHO and other countries of the event. At that stage, they were
powerless to act. The lawyer later turned out to have a less serious
form of the disease. 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. WHO's annual report also urges countries to share viruses to help
develop vaccines and to tighten domestic efforts to combat disease
outbreaks. But an ongoing battle with Indonesia, the nation hardest hit by the
deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, has yet to be resolved. Though Indonesia
has said it would send human bird flu virus samples to WHO, it has not
yet fully shared the samples. Indonesia has repeatedly demanded assurances that any pandemic vaccines
developed would be affordable for developing nations. Instead of sharing
viruses with WHO, Indonesia has signed agreements with vaccine makers,
promising to share samples in exchange for vaccine expertise. China stopped sharing H5N1 specimens with WHO for almost a year before
finally sending samples in June, while Vietnam said it sent samples but
has encountered shipping road blocks. 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 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
an outbreak or epidemic in any part of the planet is only a few hours
away from becoming an imminent threat somewhere else, the report said.
Over the last five years, WHO confirmed more than 1,100 disease
outbreaks worldwide, such as cholera, polio and bird flu. There are 39 new pathogens that were unknown a generation ago, including
HIV/AIDS, Ebola hemorrhagic fever and SARS, or severe acute respiratory
syndrome.
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