Do Communicable Diseases Spread Faster Under Globalisation?

Saksar Sawasth Aur secular Haryana
Do Communicable Diseases Spread Faster Under Globalisation?
In addition to the key area of IMF/Bank induced health sector reforms, globalisation impinges on the health sector in many other ways. Globalisation leads to transnationalisation of public health risks. A major effect has been the resurgence of communicable diseases across the globe. Every phase of human civilisation that has seen a rapid expansion in exchange of populations across national borders has been characterised by a spread of communicable diseases. The early settlers in America, who came from Europe, carried with them small pox and measles that decimated the indigenous population of Native Americans. Plague traveled to Europe from the orient in the
middle ages, often killing more than a quarter of the population of cities in Europe (like the plague
epidemic in London in the fifteenth century). what festers in a metropolitan ghetto of the global North can emerge in a sleepy village in Asia - within weeks or days.
[*Studies indicate that due to rising food prices & subsidy cuts, hunger and morbidity levels have increased. Poor people were increasingly unable to access health institutions, which, under the reform measures, typically introduced fee for services; and it is not at all surprising!*]
This is a natural consequence of exposure to local populations to exotic diseases, to which they
have little or no natural immunity. Today what incubates in a tropical rainforest can emerge in a temperate suburb in affluent Europe, and likewise
[Due to poor health, nutritional status and poor access to health care in developing countries like ours, we are most susceptible to communicable diseases.]
In the case of AIDS the combination of global mobility and cuts in health facilities has been lethal for many developing countries - the disease in Africa, and now in Asia has ravaged a whole generation. Let us not forget that AIDS first manifest itself in the US, but it was Africa that feels the real force of its wrath. In the 1960s scientists were exulting over the possible conquest to be achieved over communicable diseases. Forty years later a whole new scenario is unfolding. AIDS is its most acute manifestation. We also have resurgence of cholera, yellow fever and malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, malaria and dengue in South America, multi-drug resistant TB, plague, dengue and malaria in India. We see the emergence of exotic viral diseases, like those caused by the Ebola and the Hanta virus. Globalisation that forces migration of labour across large distances, that has spawned a huge "market" on commercial sex, that has changed the environment and helped produce "freak" microbes, has contributed enormously to the resurgence.