We're Not Ready for This

As epidemics spread with unprecedented speed, public policy is not keeping pace

- Brian Bremner, Robert Langreth, and James Paton

In the evolutionary arms race between humanity and the microbes, the bugs are making a comeback. Yes, we’ve conquered diseases such as smallpox and polio, and deaths from communicable diseases have been falling worldwide. But since 1970, more than 1,500 new pathogens have been discovered, according to the World Health Organization, and “epidemics in the 21st century are spreading faster and farther than ever. Outbreaks that were previously localized can now become global very rapidly.”

In late 2002 an airborne illness, dubbed severe acute respiratory syndrome, emerged in China’s southern Guangdong province, then quickly spread across the border and killed 774 people from Asia to Canada. In 2009 a novel influenza virus, H1N1, advanced worldwide in nine weeks and may have resulted in as many as 575,000 fatalities. The new virus from central China that’s sparked global alarm, a coronavirus known as 2019-nCoV and a close cousin to SARS, reached four continents in about five weeks.

As newer threats surface, such as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012, older scourges like cholera, plague, and yellow fever flare up with disturbing regularity. Even worse, the antibiotics that revolutionized health care in the last century are losing their punch as new strains of infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis, become more resistant to multidrug treatments. “We’ve created an interconnected, dynamically changing world that provides innumerable opportunities to microbes,” says Richard Hatchett, a former U.S. adviser on public health emergencies and head of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in Oslo. “If there’s weakness anywhere, there’s weakness everywhere.”