With new diseases emerging at an unprecedented rate in an increasingly interconnected world, often with the ability to cross borders rapidly, global public health security depends on international cooperation and surveillance more than ever, the U.N. health agency warned in its annual report. “Given today's universal vulnerability to these threats, better security calls for global solidarity,” U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan said in releasing this year's World Health Report. “International public health security is both a collective aspiration and a mutual responsibility,” she said in Geneva. For example, experts fear that the current bird-flu virus, which has so far infected 321 people, killing 194 of them, could mutate to easy human-to-human transmission. The experts say a new flu pandemic will definitely occur, but they do not know when. The report sets out the WHO strategic action plan to respond to a pandemic. It also draws attention to the need for stronger health systems and for continued vigilance in managing the risks and consequences of the international spread of polio and the newly emerging strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). The report noted that since 1967, at least 30 new pathogens have been identified, including HIV, the deadly hemorrhagic Ebola and Marburg fevers, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), with emerged in China in 2003 and spread rapidly as far as Canada, infecting more than 8,000 people, over 800 of them fatally, before it was brought under control. Other traditional threats, such as pandemic influenza, malaria, and tuberculosis, continue to pose a threat to health through a combination of mutation, rising resistance to anti-microbial medicines, and weak health systems. New threats also have emerged, linked to potential terrorist attacks, chemical incidents, and radio-nuclear accidents, the report said. The report's recommendations include global cooperation in surveillance and outbreak alert and response; open sharing of knowledge, technologies, and materials, including viruses and other laboratory samples, necessary to optimize secure global public health; and global responsibility for capacity building within the public health infrastructure of all countries. The report also called for cross-sector collaboration within governments and increased global and national resources for training, surveillance, laboratory capacity, response networks, and prevention campaigns.
