“It is imperative that we … work to rebuild, innovate, and expand (STD) prevention in the U.S.,” said Dr. Leandro Mena of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a speech Monday at a medical conference on sexually transmitted diseases.

Infections rates for some STDs, including gonorrhea and syphilis, have been rising for years. Last year the rate of syphilis cases reached its highest since 1991 and the total number of cases hit its highest since 1948. HIV cases are also on the rise, up 16% last year.

And an international outbreak of monkeypox, which is being spread mainly between men who have sex with other men, has further highlighted the nation’s worsening problem with diseases spread mostly through sex.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://apnews.com/article/monkeypox-science-health-covid-epidemics-aaac64591251293f45c225d3fe963d0c

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The post ‘Out of control’ STD situation prompts call for changes first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

All the authorities are holding out the prospect of extreme mandates on the news of the new variant.  They’re not sure about anything, but stand by.  It’s liable to confer all power to our tormentors.  Maybe it depends upon where you get your information, but we’re hearing that some of those infected with the new variant are “fully vaccinated.”   Then we’re treated to all manner of disdain if we’re not doing what we’re told.  We must be crazy.

Some courts are upholding mandates, others have ruled against them.  How can Judges be expected to make an informed ruling with contradicting messages being issued from every source?  One ruling says, “There are grave Constitutional issues.”  You mean there’s some authority higher than the light loafers on CNN!?!  Yeah, we think so.

The formula has been tested, and shown remarkable promise.  A contagious disease with the implication that government will protect the public assuming the public is prepared to follow orders without question.  Given what we’ve lived through already, some might be forgiven for a lack of trust.  The over-arching message from all government dependent parties is that everyone be vaccinated or face monumental penalties which are still being contrived.  Papers are required, and travel restrictions apply.  Have a nice vacation.

It turns out the great (in his own estimation) coronavirus whisperer may have some explaining to do as regards some of the experimentation with AIDS and chemotherapy on orphan children in the 80’s.  He’s not famous for that. Yet.  If there’s some hope on the horizon, it may be found in that adage about pride coming before a fall.  We’re seeing some of the most arrogant people, those who would dismiss us as crazy conspiracy theorists, go down in flames.  I could name three right off the top.  Inexplicable, ruinous tragedies are befalling the most arrogant people on earth.  Let’s hope it’s a trend.  Strike that.  It’s a Law of Nature, and we’re seeing it borne out.

It turns out the economy isn’t what was projected.  The job market has disappointed the prognosticators across the board.  Who’d have guessed?  Maybe lock-downs and mandates all over the place aren’t good for commerce.  The big entities aren’t distressed, but Mom and Pop have been taking it on the chin, and in the arm if they’ve followed government instructions.  Only the well-padded could hope to survive the “orders” handed down here and there across the United States.

But it seems they’re having a good time in Dubai.  An Israeli news channel has been following the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations.  Amid skyscrapers like few places on earth are swarms of celebrants, and they’re not wearing their masks!

It’s hard to believe we’re still obsessing over this, a year and a half after being told we needed

two weeks to “flatten the curve.”  But the “authorities” have decided nothing has ever been this successful.  Never has the public submitted like this, with grave fear hanging over everyone’s head.  You must agree to nonsensical blather, otherwise you may find that your freedoms are curtailed to an alarming degree.  This may be worked out by the courts, where evidence and under-oath testimony are required.  But we’ve also seen some astounding decisions that seemed to hinge on political outcomes rather than anything else.

If you’ve paid attention, you’ve heard a lot of buzz about the case before the Supreme Court.  Unfortunately “precedent” plays a huge role, even when it was set in error.  We better not get our hopes up.  Chances are it will be a nuanced decision throwing responsibility back to the States.  Some states will be accused of all manner of discriminatory mischief against women.  Having heard highlights of the arguments, the abortion defense is arguing “bodily autonomy!”

So let’s get this straight.  The very same philosophy doesn’t apply elsewhere?  No need to spell it out.  They’re all through trying to convince us of anything.  It’s all down to whether we’ll bow down to dictates, and do what we’re told by the mainstream unquestionably.  There are so many contradictions floating around, nobody knows who to believe.

But the mainstream has accepted “evolution” in the name of science, and the really smart ones have concluded there is no God.  We’re told not to question science, because well, Dr. Fauci is science according to his own reckoning.  The bad news for the global warming, green energy, corona fear factory is that God is the author of science.  Any questions?  Maybe we should consider what He says for a change.

Mark

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 3 December 2021 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is one of the world’s most serious public health challenges. But there is a global commitment to stopping new HIV infections and ensuring that everyone with HIV has access to HIV treatment.

According to UNAIDS :

Number of People with HIV—There were approximately 37.9 million people across the globe with HIV/AIDS in 2018. Of these, 36.2 million were adults and 1.7 million were children (<15 years old).

New HIV Infections—An estimated 1.7 million individuals worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2018. (New HIV infections, or “HIV incidence,” refers to the estimated number of people who newly acquired the HIV virus during a year, which is different from the number of people diagnosed with HIV during a year. Some people may have HIV but not know it.) Of these new infections:

• 1.6 million infections were among people ages 15 and older
• 160,000 infections were among children ages 0-14

HIV Testing—Approximately 79% of people with HIV globally knew their HIV status in 2018. The remaining 21% (about 8.1 million people) still need access to HIV testing services. HIV testing is an essential gateway to HIV prevention, treatment, care, and support services.

HIV Treatment Access—In 2018, 23.3 million people with HIV (62%) were accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) globally, an increase of 1.6 million since 2017, and up from 8 million in 2010. HIV treatment access is key to the global effort to end AIDS as a public health threat. People with HIV who are aware of their status, take ART daily as prescribed, and get and keep an undetectable viral load can live long, healthy lives and have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting HIV to their HIV-negative partners.

HIV Care Continuum—The term HIV care continuum refers to the sequence of steps a person with HIV takes from diagnosis through receiving treatment until his or her viral load is suppressed to undetectable levels. Each step in the continuum is marked by an assessment of the number of people who have reached that stage. The stages are: being diagnosed with HIV; being linked to medical care; starting ART; adhering to the treatment regimen; and, finally, having HIV suppressed to undetectable levels in the blood. UNAIDS’s 90-90-90 goals set as targets that by 2020, 90% of all people with HIV will know their HIV status, 90% of all people who know their status will be on ART, and 90% of all people receiving ART will have viral suppression. Tracking progress toward those goals, UNAIDS reports that in 2018, of all people with HIV worldwide:

• 79% knew their HIV status
• 78% of all people who knew their status were accessing ART
• 86% of all people receiving ART had viral suppression

Mother-to-Child Transmission—In 2018, 92% of pregnant women with HIV received ART to prevent transmitting HIV to their babies during pregnancy and childbirth and to protect their own health. This is compared to 49% in 2010.

AIDS-related Deaths—AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by more than 55% since its peak in 2004. In 2018, around 770,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide, compared to 1.2 million in 2010 and 1.7 million in 2004.

Regional Impact—The vast majority of people with HIV are in low- and middle-income countries. In 2018, there were 20.6 million people with HIV (57%) in eastern and southern Africa, 5.0 million (13%) in western and central Africa, 5.9 million (16%) in Asia and the Pacific, and 2.2 million (6%) in Western and Central Europe and North America.

Challenges and Progress

Despite advances in our scientific understanding of HIV and its prevention and treatment as well as years of significant effort by the global health community and leading government and civil society organizations, too many people with HIV or at risk for HIV still do not have access to prevention, care, and treatment, and there is still no cure. Further, the HIV epidemic not only affects the health of individuals, but it also impacts households, communities, and the development and economic growth of nations. Many of the countries hardest hit by HIV also suffer from other infectious diseases, food insecurity, and other serious problems.

Despite these challenges, there have been successes and promising signs. New global efforts have been mounted to address the epidemic, particularly in the last decade. The number of people newly infected with HIV has declined over the years. In addition, the number of people with HIV receiving treatment in resource-poor countries has dramatically increased in the past decade and dramatic progress has been made in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV and keeping mothers alive.

However, despite the availability of a widening array of effective HIV prevention tools and methods and a massive scale-up of HIV treatment in recent years, UNAIDS cautions that the pace of progress in reducing new HIV infections, increasing access to treatment, and ending AIDS-related deaths is slowing down, with some countries making impressive gains while others are experiencing rises in new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths.

U.S. Response to the Global Epidemic

The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the U.S. Government’s response to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and represents the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history. Through PEPFAR, the U.S. has supported a world safer and more secure from infectious disease threats. It has demonstrably strengthened the global capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to new and existing risks—which ultimately enhances global health security and protects America’s borders.

In addition, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) represents the largest public investment in HIV/AIDS research in the world. NIH is engaged in research around the globe to understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent HIV infection and its many associated conditions, and to find a cure.

Read more about the U.S. Government’s global HIV/AIDS activities.

Source: https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/global-statistics

The post The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic – 770,000 AIDS deaths in 2018 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

We were sick to death of hearing about the wretched bat-flu, the government models, the horrible predictions, all of it, about seven weeks ago.  But we’ve heard almost nothing else.  Apparently the virus will dominate everything for the foreseeable future.  Despite the fact that the “models” were as phony as global warming, the orders have only ratcheted up, in some cases because there are arguments about the sanity of the demands, and some have just decided to disobey and go about their lives regardless.

Oooh, does that ever make them upset!  They’ll only have to extend the “lock-down” and introduce stringent punishments for dissenters. That ought to show us who’s the boss of us!  Governors and commissioners and health department officials you never heard of, that’s who.

We’re learning things amid the greatest health-scare in history that we’d just as soon have never known.  One of them is the rush local “officials” get when they issue orders, proclamations, or edicts.  There’s nothing that allows them to do that in our national Constitution, but apparently State Constitutions have little-known clauses that allow them to issue orders on the basis of “the public health and safety,” or some such. You would expect such powers to have been used sparingly, even apologetically, but we’ve seen that is not necessarily the case.  There are some particularly notable cases, like Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who better not get any guff.  “These aren’t helpful hints or suggestions, they are the law!”  (Hopefully, a court will return her to reality, someday.)

Constitutional experts dare to differ.  Who do these governors think they are, Pharaoh?  “So let it be said, let it be done.”  Uh, what about the consent of the governed?  What about, “We, the people?” Last time we checked, this isn’t ancient Egypt.  No, suddenly she has all the cameras pointed at her and she’s risen up in all her preening power to let all concerned know exactly what’s up.  Bully for her.  We can hardly wait for her idiotic orders (you can go to Lowes, but NOT to the garden center) to see a higher court.  But even that’s no guarantee.

It turns out that this thing has political overtones like you wouldn’t believe.  Those preaching the gospel of socialism want the shutdown to go on and on, with no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.  Suddenly the answer is FREE government money for everybody.  Even some conservatives are touting that as the solution.  Have we taken leave of everything we believed?  Liberal judges have shown no qualms about using their power against the interests of a sovereign United States, as we’ve seen in so many cases, notably immigration cases, and this is no different.  Their rulings often depend on their agenda, not the facts at hand, as we are often reminded.

This thing could turn ugly, though we certainly hope not.  Anchors on the mainstream news have not been reticent about expressing their own anger and fury at anybody not following “the rules.”  That’s interesting because the “rules” are changing by the day.  Apparently doctors make their recommendations and then local officials lower the boom on the basis of “science.”  It shouldn’t be this way, but the “science” shows whatever they deem it to show.  The “experts” told us that healthy people had no reason to wear masks, but they’ve changed their minds.  Now we’re endangering ourselves and others if we don’t wear them, or we’re banned from entry assuming some place is open.  We can hardly wait for the “experts’” next revelation.

Wisconsin residents rushed out to the restaurants and bars as soon as it was announced that the State Supreme Court had struck down the governor’s stay-at-home orders.  They (the orders) were found to be in violation of Constitutional rights.  How somebody managed to get their complaint heard in short order is a mystery, but residents are obviously thrilled to learn their governor does not have the authority to keep them under house arrest or sanction them for going about their lives.

We were all told that we had to “follow orders” in order to “flatten the curve” so hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed. The curve is not only flattened but headed downward.  So why are carefully made up and coiffed “officials” extending their shutdown orders and threatening everyone who dares disagree?  Governor Newsome of California just told those poor folks that nothing would ever be the same again unless or until an effective vaccine is available.  But a vaccine may never be available, despite hopes that one will be found.  But the California Summer has been canceled, along with school next year.  The kids are probably ecstatic, and their parents are scouring the map.

Do you know how long they’ve been looking for a vaccine for AIDS?  Since the early-mid ’80s, and there’s still no such thing.  (That’s something that might interest those under the age of 35).  The media spent weeks, months, maybe years, trying to convince us that we were all going to die of AIDS in the ’80s.  It was contagious off the charts, and not limited to, uh, any certain “community.”

They’ve spent the last 20 years telling us “the planet will die” unless we buy their fake charts and graphs.  When proven wrong, and when caught making up their “data” out of whole cloth, they double down.  Well, they’ve got a brand new toy.  Let’s hope it breaks before they destroy everything.  In one underreported exchange last week, Dr. Birx (aka scarf lady) told the director of the CDC that she can’t trust anything they report, and their figures have been inflated by at least 25%.  But, we all have to follow CDC guidelines, isn’t that the fall back retort to every question?

We have an innate penchant toward optimism.  Most of us, anyway.  We want to believe that everything will be ok, that life will go on, that the kids and the grandkids will be just fine, it’s in our nature.  That’s always been viewed as a good thing, but not now!  If they have to “inconvenience” us for an extended period of time, too bad.  It could be worse you know.  You could go out and get INFECTED, or dead!  Then how would you feel?

Believe it or not, we remain optimistic.  We know a time is coming when these power-drunk little officials are going to find out they are not the boss of anybody or anything.  Our hope is not in this life only, but a future time when God Himself will show everybody who’s Boss.  The high officials may actually have a hand in hurrying along their own day of reckoning.  Hope they’re having fun.

Mark

PS Our Sabbath services are back to normal and don’t tell anyone, but we dare to shake hands and hug each other. We hope the “authorities” will allow us all to see each other again before long. In fact, we sent an invitation for Pentecost to be held in Clarksville, TN this year.  If you didn’t get the letter and would like to join us, call for details.  Until then, have a great Sabbath and keep the faith.  Better days are ahead.

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 15 May 2020 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Somewhere out there a dangerous virus is boiling up in the bloodstream of a bird, bat, monkey or pig, preparing to jump to a human being. It’s hard to comprehend the scope of such a threat, for it has the potential to wipe out millions of us, including my family and yours, over a matter of weeks or months. The risk makes the threat posed by Islamic State, a ground war, a massive climate event or even the dropping of a nuclear bomb on a major city pale by comparison.

A new epidemic could turn into a pandemic without warning. It could be born in a factory farm in Minnesota, a poultry farm in China or the bat-inhabited elephant caves of Kenya – anywhere infected animals are in contact with humans. It could be a variation of the 1918 Spanish flu, one of hundreds of other known microbial threats or something entirely new, such as the 2003 Sars virus that spread globally from China. Once transmitted to a human, an airborne virus could pass from that one infected individual to 25,000 others within a week, and to more than 700,000 within the first month. Within three months, it could spread to every major urban centre in the world. And by six months, it could infect more than 300 million people and kill more than 30 million.

This is not alarmist science fiction. It is one of several highly plausible scenarios – and far from the worst – developed by infectious disease specialists working with disease-modelling experts. Bill Gates, who funds a group that uses computer simulations to predict the spread of diseases, said: “The Ebola epidemic showed me that we are not ready for a serious epidemic, an epidemic that would be more infectious and would spread faster than Ebola did.” He put the likelihood of a catastrophic epidemic at “well over 50%” in his lifetime.

Gates’s model estimates that a perilous virus, carried via cars, planes, ships and trains, and spreading quickly in packed cities, could kill up to 33 million people in just over 200 days.

In the last century alone, smallpox killed 300 to 500 million people. The 1918-19 Spanish flu killed 50 to 100 million and Aids has taken 40 million lives since it was first recognised in 1981. The annual influenza outbreak still claims half a million people a year worldwide. The west African Ebola crisis took more than 11,000 lives – seven times the total of the 22 Ebola epidemics that preceded it. But widespread death isn’t the only threat. For those who survive the initial infection, an epidemic leaves its own particular trail of disfigurement and disability. People who contracted smallpox suffered characteristic, sometimes horrific, scars, along with blindness, limb deformities and other disabilities. As a lifelong condition, Aids and the side-effects of treatment can affect nearly every body system, from brain to bone.

In the early stages of a new epidemic – before it has been recognised or how it spreads has been determined, and before appropriate protection measures are in place – health workers die in high numbers. As with war, where common illness can take more lives than war injuries, epidemics sometimes take more lives from disruption of primary health care than from the epidemic itself. Because health workers are diverted to emergency response centres, and health facilities are sometimes closed, epidemics can also disrupt routine public healthcare needs such as immunisation, treatment of acute illness and facility-based births.

Finally, there is the stunning financial and economic cost to households, communities, businesses and entire countries. Such a pandemic could cause a global stock market crash that obliterates the livelihoods and savings of millions of survivors. “A severe and prolonged global pandemic could … hit global GDP by as much as 5-10% in the first year,” noted the authors of the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch 2015 Global Pandemics Primer report.

Oxford Economics has suggested that the cost of a global pandemic, including spillover across industry sectors, could be as great as $3.5tn – an impact far greater than the magnitude of the great financial crisis of 2008.

Every year, the world spends more than $50bn controlling epidemics such as avian influenza, HIV/Aids, malaria and polio, and responding to new threats such as Ebola. In addition to the direct cost of preparedness, immunisation and emergency response, there’s the indirect cost of disruption in travel, transport of goods, tourism, financial markets and other areas of economic activity. Wherever it has been measured, this indirect economic impact is at least equal to and usually greater than the direct cost, bringing the total cost of infectious disease epidemics close to $100bn a year. In short, even in the absence of Gates’s imagined pandemic, we can expect to spend $1tn on epidemics over the next decade unless we fundamentally change course.

Scientists don’t know which microbe it will be, where it will come from or whether it will be transmitted through the air, by touch, through bodily fluids or through a combination of routes, but they do know that epidemics behave a bit like earthquakes. Scientists know that a “big one” is coming because scores of new, smaller earthquakes pop up around the globe every year.

I write this not just because I’m scared. I’m also furious. Many leaders, economists and scientists believe that the risk of potentially devastating epidemics could be prevented for a fraction of the cost of battling an out of control global pandemic.

The obvious question is this: why aren’t we deploying absolutely everything we have to make sure that the next disease outbreak doesn’t turn into a global catastrophe? There are three broad answers.

First, there’s fear. We are all afraid of death. We respond to the fear of epidemic disease by wanting to blame someone else. Any time a threat arises, we want to blame the “other”, those not like “us”. At the outbreak of the 1918 Spanish flu, Americans blamed “the Hun”. Aids was blamed on gay men.

We want to punish those with the disease, pretending that whatever makes them other has cursed them. The most contagious behavioural reaction that affects political leaders, businesspeople and the public is panic that disproportionately exceeds the actual event. Scared people overpersonalise the news, and their worries increase. Fear is a warning system intended to alert us to impending danger, just as it is in animals. When we let it override our rationality, we make things much worse.

Second is denial and complacency, which often starts at the top, with political leaders or public health officials who reject the reality before them. Denial undermines the very trust needed to combat an epidemic. And complacency sets in when the last epidemic passes. We feel that we’ll have the silver bullet vaccine in time; that technology will save us, so we don’t need to spend time and money on basic prevention.

Finally, financial self-interest: how many vaccines never get developed because poor people can’t pay for the drugs that pharmaceutical companies could develop? How many times do governments and leaders plead that there is no budget for preparedness? How many disease-fostering agribusiness companies line the pockets of politicians who conveniently overlook the threats bubbling up from factory farm sewage?

Not recognising these failings – and not doing everything we can in spite of them to prevent a potentially staggering loss of life and livelihood – would be not just irresponsible, but criminal.

All kinds of complex and interconnected social, economic and environmental risk factors contribute to the emergence and spread of disease.

Consider how just one, population growth, leads to a whole set of others. The world’s population is now more than 7.5 billion and it is projected to increase by more than 2 billion people by mid-century. More than half that number will be born in Africa, and most of them will be packed into dense urban areas where an epidemic can spread like wildfire.

The more people there are, the greater the demand for shelter, food and water. Imagine that you are a poor person living in a remote part of Guinea or the Amazon jungle, and you want to do the thing that is most instinctive for all of us: to stay alive. If you are lucky enough to procure cows, goats or chickens, you need room for a pasture. And if you need wood for fires or to build a house, you chop down the trees. But your own personal needs are nothing in comparison to the demands of agribusiness and industry, which obliterates millions of acres of forestland each year. Between 2000 and 2010, these industries annually consumed some 13 million hectares (50,000 square miles).

Clear-cutting – cutting down every tree in an area – brings people in closer contact with primates, rodents and bats that carry dangerous pathogens. Some researchers believe that ravaged tropical forests and increased human activity in countries such as Liberia and Guinea presented an ideal opportunity for the Ebola virus to jump from its natural reservoir to humans.

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Deforestation also leads to flooding, which attracts mosquitoes. The hotter the jungle (and the planet) becomes as a result of all this deforestation, the happier mosquitoes are. If you’re living near a forest in Africa and have the leisure to be focused on more than your survival, you may have begun to notice that some amphibians and birds that hunted mosquitoes have disappeared (because they are extinct). Those that are not extinct may have migrated to more northerly realms that are rapidly becoming more hospitable, thanks to global climate change.

Viruses such as Ebola, Aids and Zika aren’t like fastidious plants that stay rooted in only one place. On any given day, millions of people around the world are moving around on planes, trains, boats, trucks and automobiles, some from places where undiscovered viruses are festering in the bloodstreams of wild beasts and fowls. An average of 10 million people a day take to the skies; 3.5 billion passenger flights a year.

All this creates huge opportunities for the transcontinental spread of pathogens such as Sars, Ebola or Zika. A person who has been infected in a hot zone won’t feel ill for days or weeks, not until they land in Dallas, Singapore, London or New York. And the duration of the longest intercontinental flights is now greater than the incubation period of several common pathogens. A person may be asymptomatic when they get on a jumbo jet in Hong Kong, but by the time they land in New York they will have spread the virus to the crew and passengers.

In the case of Aids, the virus spread slowly at first. Then, as Africa became more urbanised and roads connected remote regions to cities, men went to the cities to look for work. Those men hooked up with infected prostitutes who spread the virus to clients.

Disease travels especially fast in west Africa, where the population is highly mobile. People move around a lot to look for work or food or to visit extended family members across borders. Also, sick people will travel to countries that have the resources to treat them when their own countries do not. One sick individual crossing a border to seek a cure could start a wave of new infections across a country that has all but succeeded in controlling an outbreak. The problem is compounded by the illegal trade of goods, animals and people; there is often no record of who or what may have entered a country, or when or where that person or animal carrying a deadly virus might have done so, making the prevention and treatment of the disease very difficult.

And like the proverbial butterfly whose beating wings can set off a hurricane somewhere far away, any single human being can do something that sets off catastrophic consequences. People need to have sex; before Aids broke out, thousands spread the disease through unprotected sex, and a few irresponsible ones continued this behaviour even after discovering they had contracted HIV.

Humans hug and kiss: during the Ebola crisis, containing the disease was made far more difficult not just because of an ancient tradition of kissing dead bodies but because people insist on touching one another. And human beings need to eat: given a choice between starvation and risking disease, most people would prefer to roast a monkey or a bat.

Ebola, Aids and Zika each arose in the first half of the 20th century and spent their first several decades in the African bush, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. But they are three very different examples of emerging infectious diseases. And they are just three of nearly 400 new infectious diseases that have been identified in the last 75 years. Since 1971, scientists have discovered at least 25 new pathogens for which we have no vaccine and no treatment.

Even more worrying is the rate at which emerging infectious diseases are appearing: the number of new ones has been increasing each decade, more than tripling between 1940 and 2000. During the 1980s, the number of new infectious diseases rose to nearly 100, reflecting an association with the Aids pandemic. In 2014, the World Health Organisation recorded more than 100 disease outbreaks.

What to do?

For less than $1 per year for every person on the planet (spent on the right things), we could prevent the next local disease outbreak from turning into Bill Gates’s feared global pandemic. That’s less than half of what Americans alone spend on video games each year and a small fraction of Gates’s net worth. It’s far less than the current annual cost of dealing with Aids, an epidemic the world allowed to spin out of control. And it’s nothing compared with what a pandemic would cost the world in emergency response and economic disruption. Those investment funds would support innovation for prevention, strengthen developing countries’ health systems, and support emergency response to ensure that microbial invaders never arrive at the gates.

There are seven essential sets of actions if we want to set about ending epidemics. These seven actions emerged out of in-depth analyses of five epidemics: smallpox, influenza, Aids, Sars and Ebola. I chose these five diseases because together they killed more than half a billion people in the last 100 years and because they reflect different types of epidemics.

• 1. Lead as though the house is on fire

Just as firefighters race into the burning building, those responsible for protecting public health need to act rapidly and on the basis of scientific evidence, not political interests. Leaders at the highest level must put the public good above parochial interests.

• 2. Resilient systems, global security

Strong national public health systems are the foundations for prevention and preparedness. National governments, the private sector, communities and faith-based organisations have been enormously successful when they work in concert to fight disease. Robust international agencies and non-governmental organisations are essential to support even the poorest countries in mounting successful defences.

• 3. Active prevention, constant readiness

Epidemics can be stopped by prevention through healthy self-care habits, immunisation and fighting mosquitoes; early detection of disease through surveillance at all levels; and rapid response to treat the sick, prevent the spread and maintain routine health services.

• 4. Fatal fictions, timely truths

In the face of an epidemic, terror, blame, rumours and conspiracy theories, distrust of authorities and panic can take hold simultaneously. This is why establishing and maintaining trust through honest, clear communication at local level is paramount. History continues to show us that health communication lies at the heart of epidemic control. Fighting rumour with truth is a job for professional communication teams working with local and national governments, international agencies, communities, print and broadcast media and social media.

• 5. Disruptive innovation, collaborative transformation We need to do everything we can to support the work of scientists who are applying breakthrough techniques to identify viruses and prevent them from jumping to people, and we must help those who are working to nip outbreaks in the bud. We need to do better research and development to diagnose illness quickly and treat it immediately. We must discover new vaccines, make more of them and figure out better distribution strategies.

• 6. Invest wisely, save lives

A worldwide pandemic could cost the economy several trillion dollars. But an ounce of prevention, in terms of money, is truly worth a pound of cure when it comes to stopping epidemics. By investing an average of just $7.5bn more annually for the next 20 years ($1 per person per year) in the right preventive and response measures at the right times, we can substantially reduce the chance of epidemics and more than repay ourselves in savings.

• 7. Ring the alarm, rouse the leaders

… with local, national and international voices that track capacity, performance and resources. This is a job for citizens and concerned stakeholders. We achieve progress through a combination of good science, strong leadership and committed advocacy.

I vividly remember the debates we had among global health professionals about Aids treatment in 2000 and the sense of achievement we felt in 2010. During that decade, the unthinkable became reality before our eyes. A determined group of activists, people living with HIV/Aids, health officials and political leaders built a global movement that proved the naysayers wrong by successfully overcoming each barrier to build the largest public health treatment programme in history. That experience transformed my understanding of the word “impossible” and what we can do – with these seven essentials – to stop epidemics.

We know how to stop the next epidemic. This is no excuse for unpreparedness. If we are to save ourselves and our children we must act decisively. The threat is real. The pathway is known. The time for action is now.

Dr Jonathan D Quick, of the Harvard Medical School, is Chair of the Global Health Council, and author of The End of Epidemics.

DEFINING DISEASE

Outbreak

A localised epidemic that affects hundreds or thousands of people

Epidemic

An illness or infection that is in excess of normal expectations

Pandemic

An epidemic over a very wide area, crosses borders and touches thousands or millions of lives

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/18/end-epidemics-aids-ebola-sars-sunday-essay

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