Infectious diseases are emerging faster than ever: WHO

from Yahoo News

GENEVA (AFP) - Infectious diseases are emerging faster than ever before, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned in a report on Thursday, urging closer global cooperation to tackle the growing health threat.

The report warned of the threat from epidemics, foodborne diseases, chemical, biological or nuclear accidents or attacks and industrial pollution.

It also evoked climate change "that may put millions of people at risk in several countries".

Open sharing of medical know-how, technology and supplies between rich and poor countries is also crucial, and "one of the most feasible routes to global health security," it said in the 2007 World Health Report "A Safer Future".

Since the 1970s new diseases have been identified at the "unprecedented" rate of one or more per year, the report said.

Other centuries-old threats such as influenza, malaria and tuberculosis were also thriving due to a combination of biological mutations, rising resistance to antibiotics and weak health systems.

"Given today's universal vulnerability to these threats, better security calls for global solidarity," WHO Director General Margaret Chan said in a statement.

The report stressed that health threats were no longer easily confined within a country but could spread around the world swiftly, partly due to the expansion in passenger air travel over the past half century and to trade.

It warned of "serious gaps, particularly in health services in many countries," caused by poverty or a lack of investment, that severely weakened the global safety net.

Health and medical care were not only essential for treatment and prevention, but also for detecting new threats such as outbreaks, new diseases, as well as bioweapon attacks, environmental health problems, said the report.

"It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like AIDS, another Ebola, another SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), sooner or later."

The three historical advances that helped stifle diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera and smallpox -- quarantines, better sanitation and immunisation -- became successes once they were applied internationally, the report argued.

The UN agency's battle to fight disease often came up against political and logistical problems, the report noted.

It referred to the suspension of the polio vaccination programme in northern Nigeria in 2003, when the authorities there claimed it could leave children sterile.

"The result was a large outbreak of polio across northern Nigeria and the reinfection of previously polio-free areas in the south of the country."

The outbreak left thousands of children paralysed and spread to 19 other countries that had been free of the disease, the reported added.

The civil war in Angola had hampered efforts to tackle an outbreak of Marburg haemorrhagic fever in 2005: 90 percent of the 200 people affected died.

The WHO introduced new international health regulations this year to sharpen the response of its 193 members to major health threats within their own borders or abroad.

It is also trying to resolve Indonesian complaints about the availability of newly developed medicines in poor countries, which halted crucial bird flu virus sharing with foreign laboratories.

The sharing of tissue samples from human victims is needed to detect possible mutations in the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus -- one of the biggest fears of the beginning of this century -- that might lead to a flu pandemic.