PandemicsThe dangerous combination of civil war and threat of global pandemics
There are thirty civil wars underway around the globe, where civilians are dealing with death and destruction as well as public health emergencies exacerbated by the deadly march of conflict. And yet today, of the nearly 200 countries on this planet, only six nations — three rich ones and three poor ones — have taken steps to evaluate their ability to withstand a global pandemic. “The bottom line is that despite the profound global threat of pandemics, there remains no global health mechanism to force parties to act in accordance with global health interests,” says one expert. “The unpredictability of a serious infectious outbreak, the speed with which it can disseminate, and the fears of domestic political audience can together create a powerful destabilizing force,” says another.
There are thirty civil wars underway around the globe, where civilians are dealing with death and destruction as well as public health emergencies exacerbated by the deadly march of conflict.
Yemen is battling an unprecedented cholera outbreak which has killed more than 2,150 people this year, with another 700,000 suspected cases of the water-borne disease. The government and a rival faction have been fighting for control of the country, taking 10,000 lives since 2015.
Some seventeen children in Syria have been paralyzed from a confirmed polio outbreak in northeastern districts, with forty cases reported in a country that had not had a case of polio since 1999. The cases are concentrated in areas controlled by opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.
And in the Democratic Republic of Congo — where the civil war officially ended years ago, but thousands of people still suffer from recurrent uprisings and scant infrastructure — a yellow fever outbreak was met last year with a lack of vaccines. The WHO was forced to give inoculations containing a fifth of the normal dose, providing protection for only one year.
And yet today, of the nearly 200 countries on this planet, only six nations — three rich ones and three poor ones — have taken steps to evaluate their ability to withstand a global pandemic.
“The bottom line is that despite the profound global threat of pandemics, there remains no global health mechanism to force parties to act in accordance with global health interests,” write Freeman Spogli Institute’s (FSI) Paul Wise and Michele Barry in the Fall 2017 issue of Daedalus.
“There also persists inherent disincentives for countries to report an infectious outbreak early in its course,” the authors write. “The economic impact of such a report can be profound, particularly for countries heavily dependent upon tourism or international trade.”
China, for example, hesitated to report the SARS outbreak in 2002 for fear of instability during political transition and embarrassment over early mishandling of the outbreak. Reporting cases of the 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa were slow and the virus killed some 11,300 people in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia before the epidemic was declared over in January 2016.
