Globalization and Diseases

GLOBALIZATION AND DISEASES
The Health Expert - Sophia Chew

With the flow of information, products, capital and people across political and geographic borders, Globalization, have resulted in the spread of some of the dealiest infectious diseases known to humans. The spread of diseases across wide geographic scales increases with time. This is because in the modern world today, globalization has overtaken us so greatly that we become more and more interdependent on one another.

With the discovery of modes of transportation, they have enabled people and products to travel around the globe at a faster and more effective pace and unknowingly, open the airways to the transcontinental movement of infectious disease vectors (creatures that carry germs from one species to another). Air travel have allowed people to visit foreign lands, contract a disease whereby symptoms do not appear until they get home, having infected others to the disease along their journey back. Hence, when a population is infected with a new disease, where no antibodies have been developed, the disease tends to run rampant within the population. It is extremely dangerous and critical if the disease is fatal.

With the progression of medicine research, various vaccines and cures have been discovered to treat some of the worst diseases the world has encountered, such as plague, cholera and malaria. However, disease organisms have a tendency to multiply and evolve at a very rapid rate and ‘attack’ at the most unmindful times, and even with vaccines, we have difficulty providing full immunity to many diseases and finding vaccines for some diseases remains extremely difficult. Vaccines are essential; without them, our world is vulnerable to infectious diseases.


Specific Diseases

Plague

spread of plague in Europe

In the beginning of 14th century, Plague, caused by the enterobacteria, Yersinia pestis, devastated the world. It is primarily spread by fleas which live on common black rats. A human would become infected after being bitten by an infected flea resulting in swelling of the skin and eventually be covered with dark splotches caused by bleeding under the skin. During the 14th and 15th century, humans did not know that a bacterium was the cause of plague, and thus, efforts to slow the spread were futile.

Outbreak of the plague happened in China in the 1330s when China was engaged in trade with western Asia and Europe. Europe was then struck with the plague in October of 1347. The plague first struck port cities, followed by both sea and land trade routes. It was rampant through Italy into France and the British Isles and was then carried over the Alps into Switzerland, and eastward into Hungary and Russia. It occurred throughout the 14th and 15th century however, later epidemics were never as widespread as earlier outbreaks. This is because vaccinese and measures were slowly discovered overtime to combat the bacterium.

HIV/AIDS

Prevalence of HIV infected adults per country at the end of 2005

Aids or HIV is among the latest and most fatalistic disease in the world today. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a virus that causes Acquired immunodificiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which the body’s immune system begins to break down leading to a high possibility of death.
The first few cases occurred in 1981 and as of 2004, an estimated number of 1,039,000 to 1,185,000 people in the United States were livning with HIV/AIDS, and an estimated 39.5 million worldwide are living with HIV. According to the World Health Organization, the numbers are increasing despite global efforts, awareness and measures taken to deal with this problem. Since 2004, there has already been a shocking increase of 50% in the number of infected of persons.