War on Disease:Challenges for Humanity

More people on the planet providing more places for mosquitoes to breed, the stage is set for a public health disaster of hemispheric proportions

At least 20 major maladies have reemerged in novel, more deadly, or drug-resistant forms in the past 25 years.

Worldwide, scientists have discovered at least 30 previously unknown human diseases for which no cure exists, such as Marburg disease and AIDS.

In developing nations, people were hacking their way into previously inaccessible areas

Third World metropolises grew increasingly crowded, overwhelming sewage and water systems and providing a microbial mixing bowl for the creation of new diseases.

Wars in nations least able to afford them spawned immense human migrations and refugee settlements with little or no sanitation or medical care.

Changing patterns of temperature and rainfall allowed disease-carrying insects to extend their range.

"The world definitely favors the bugs; microbes have the advantage," says Jim Hughes, Director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. "There are a lot more of them than us. Their generation time is minutes instead of years. They evolve rapidly. And, of course, we aid and abet them in many ways—by travel, commerce in foodstuffs, transportation of animals, and our abuse and overuse of antibiotics. We're playing right into their hands.”

Terrorists can take advantage of that modern vulnerability and intentionally sow the seeds of

a devastating disease.

Even without the element of intentional terror, diseases are a huge source of human suffering—and a

tremendously destabilizing force.

Nations can enhance their own stability by taming diseases abroad. The catch is that public health improvements are difficult to implement in countries that are

politically unstable or at war, as many of the world's most plague-afflicted nations are today.

The watchword is "surveillance," and it is the linchpin in the battle against emerging diseases.

It's a future in which people will begin to see that with just six billion of us against so many more of them, we all have a stake in

even the most distant emerging microbial coup.