UNITED NATIONS: As World Health Day approaches this Saturday, international experts are focusing on the formidable and mounting threats to the world’s collective health security.

These include emerging and rapidly spreading diseases, environmental change, the danger of bioterrorism, sudden and intense humanitarian emergencies caused by natural disasters, chemical spills or radioactive accidents, and the impact of HIV/AIDS, a disease that threatens the stability of communities in some of the poorest countries in the world.

“The uncertainty and destructive potential of disease outbreaks and acute public health emergencies gives them a high public and political profile,” said Margaret Chan, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) director-general.

“When the world is collectively at risk, defence becomes a shared responsibility of all nations,” Chan stressed. “We live in a world where threats to health arise from the speed and volume of air travel, the way we produce and trade food, the way we use and misuse antibiotics, and the way we manage the environment.”

Globalisation has brought some benefits from efficient transport and trade to people across the world. But it has also allowed the rapid spread of diseases that otherwise may have been contained by geographical boundaries, or that in another era may have travelled slowly enough to be brought quickly under control, according to “Invest in Health, Build a Safer Future,” a WHO report launched to coincide with World Health Day.

“In today’s world, health security needs to be provided through coordinated action and cooperation between and within governments, the corporate sector, civil society, media and individuals,” the report stresses.

No single institution or country has all the capacities needed to respond to international public health emergencies caused by epidemics, natural disasters or environmental emergencies, or by new and emerging infectious diseases, according to the WHO. “Health, development and global security are inextricably linked,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in his message for World Health Day. —Dawn/The IPS News Service