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David Batty and agencies
Thursday August 23, 2007
Guardian Unlimited A new killer disease on a par with HIV/Aids or ebola is likely to emerge
in the next few years and threaten the lives of millions of people
worldwide, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said today.
Potentially deadly new diseases are being identified at an
"unprecedented rate", with global epidemics spreading more rapidly than
ever, the United Nations agency warned in its annual world health report. At least one new disease has been identified every year since the 1970s.
Today, there are 39 that were unknown just over a generation ago. The WHO director general, Margaret Chan, said in the report:
"Vulnerability is universal. New diseases are emerging at the
historically unprecedented rate of one per year." Governments worldwide must keep watch for new threats like the emergence
in 2003 of Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which spread from
China to 30 countries and killed 800 people, said the report. "It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will
not be another disease like Aids, another ebola, or another Sars, sooner
or later," it said. The agency said infectious diseases were spreading faster due to global
travel, with more than 1,100 epidemics verified in the last five years,
including bird flu, cholera and polio. With more than 2 billion people travelling by air every year, the WHO
said "an outbreak or epidemic in one part of the world is only a few
hours away from becoming an imminent threat somewhere else". "Infectious diseases are now spreading geographically much faster than
at any time in history." The report called for stricter monitoring of diseases prone to becoming
epidemics, such as cholera and yellow fever. The agency said that while the H5N1 bird flu virus had not so far
mutated into a form that passes easily between humans, the next
influenza pandemic was "likely to be of an avian variety" and could
affect around 1.5 billion people. "The question of a pandemic of influenza from this virus or another
avian influenza virus is still a matter of when, not if," the report said. Poorer countries might also need help to identify emerging viral
diseases such as ebola and Marburg haemorrhagic fever, both of which
cause severe and fatal bleeding, in order to contain outbreaks, it said. The WHO warned that global efforts to control infectious diseases had
been "seriously jeopardised" by the rise in drug-resistant strains of
diseases, which it blamed on poor medical treatment and misuse of
antibiotics. This problem threatened the global fight against tuberculosis, with
outbreaks of extensively drug-resistant (XDR-TB) strains of the disease
identified across the globe. "Drug resistance is also evident in diarrhoeal diseases,
hospital-acquired infections, malaria, meningitis, respiratory tract
infections, and sexually transmitted infections, and is emerging in
HIV," the report said.
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