Cure for the Asian Flu, A

In this essay, Ruth Levine argues that the international health community can learn much about global connections and subsequently global infectious disease control from the financial sector. She refers to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, where large monetary interventions were made by wealthy countries to stop the spread of the crisis.

Levine argues that in sharp contrast to the financial sector, the public health sector lacks the understanding of global connections, and that policymakers “do not understand that ‘fighting it over there so we don’t have to fight it over here’ has profound resonance in the infectious disease world.”

Levine argues that public health professionals have an important role to play in convincing wealthy international institutions into making a positive difference in the area of global health. One way that she suggests this can be done is by showing key players in the global financial sector how their welfare is connected to the control of communicable disease. She also suggests that rather than compete for resources, public health programmes should share the large amounts of resources that are routinely made available.

Levine goes on to say that “[we] have a long way to go to create the institutions and policy instruments to deal with the global nature of infectious disease…Creating an agenda around these mechanisms and implementing it in a serious way represents one of the great challenges of our age.”