Chapter 15 - Rights-based global health security through all-hazard risk management

Abstract

Countries continuously face health-security threats posed by emerging and reemerging infectious disease hazards. Ebola, Lassa, Zika, MERS-CoV, plague, cholera, and influenza have demonstrated their pandemic potential, reiterating that investments in global health security are critical to keeping communities safe. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that our global health security is only as strong as the weakest link in any health system. Therefore, making the world safer for everyone includes finishing the ongoing fights against infectious disease hazards such as HIV, TB, and malaria, which kill 2.7million people annually. Individual events caused by various hazards create simultaneous events that lead to concurrent emergencies resulting in compounding impacts on the lives, livelihoods and health of populations. Countries must work across the emergency management cycle with a whole-of-society approach to prepare for concurrent emergencies that strain already burdened systems to ensure the protection of their populations. This is exemplified by the protracted COVID-19 pandemic, whereby countries continue to fight different outbreaks due to novel variants of SARS-CoV-2, while experiencing simultaneous emergencies and disasters, for example, extreme heat, earthquakes, targeted violence, and cybersecurity incidents. Responding to and recovering from the complexity of these disasters presents significant challenges to countries already experiencing staggering effects of COVID-19 on human, financial, and physical resources. Understanding this burden posed by concurrent emergencies and addressing them is therefore critical to ensuring global health security.