The just-published issue of Biosecurity and Bioterrorism carries an essay by Ruth Levine, "A Cure for the Asian Flu," arguing that the international public health community may have a few things to learn from macroeconomists who work on financial crises. Odd as the parallel might seem, there's something to it. In the financial sector, she argues, policymakers understand very clearly that trouble in far flung locales, say Indonesia and Thailand in 1997, can quickly spell trouble for the Dow Jones, the FTSE and the DAX. Because of that understanding, and the magnitude of the stakes involved, fast, big-money interventions are made to stop the spread of "financial contagion." In the public health world, neither the understanding of global connections, nor the ways and means for global infectious disease control, are as well developed. As a result, we don't have "the motivation, the mechanisms or the money" to address emerging threats, be they polio or avian influenza. While the international community regularly ponies up $10-100 billion to deal with financial crises, those who are working on major health threats have to scrape together relatively small amounts to even do basic surveillance and preparatory work. And we haven't developed insurance-type instruments or rapid-response funds to mitigate risks effectively.
We have a long way to go to create the institutions and policy instruments to deal with the global nature of infectious disease. If we as a global community cared as much about lives as we do about money, we would have an extremely robust and well-resourced set of institutions at the national and international levels, and we would have established instruments to mitigate the risk of infectious disease. Creating an agenda around these mechanisms and implementing it in a serious way represents one of the great challenges of our age.
Agree or disagree, this short piece is worth a read.
