Globalized Virus Infections

Abstract

The world is once again suffering from infectious diseases just as it was 200 years ago, when the medical and biological sciences were in their infancy. Today, however, these diseases present themselves with unusual strength. AIDS cases have increased from hundreds or thousands in the 1980s to more than 36 million, and foot-and-mouth disease, which affects hoofed animals, has spread practically throughout the globe, afflicting even developed countries such as Britain and the majority of the Western European countries. Given current levels of scientific and technological development, how can all this have taken place? Environmental dangers and catastrophes can never be separated from their economic and political contexts. For example, the explosion of a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in December 1984 killed between 2,000 and 5,000 persons and left more than 86,000 with permanent lung damage (the number of claimants reached 600,000). The Bhopal plant was operating under security measures inferior to those at its sister plant in West Virginia in the United States. Its vapor detection devices were of poor quality, its emergency systems were inadequate, and none of these were automatic (Sem, 1995; Karliner, 1997). Furthermore, the presence of this plant in India cannot be understood without reference to the Green Revolution, a project designed to revolutionize Indian agriculture with hybrid seeds that required a high input of chemicals, among them the pesticides produced by the Union Carbide plant (Wisner, 2000). Again, between April 24 and 27, 2001, a meeting was held in Nigeria to address the AIDS epidemic. Ninety-five percent of the victims of AIDS live in developing countries, and of these 25 million live in Africa. The HIV virus