UNWANTED TRAVELERS

Diseases as well as people can travel around the globe, and some of them are deadly.   "The dramatic increases in worldwide movement of people, goods, and ideas is the driving force behind globalization of disease," explains Professor Jonathan M. Mann, an expert on epidemics.  "The world has rapidly become much more  vulnerable to the eruption and,  most critically, to the widespread and even global spread of both new and old infectious diseases."

Nothing symbolizes this new global vulnerability more dramatically than the AIDS pandemic, which is now killing about three million people every year.  In some countries of Africa, health workers fear that the disease will eventually kill two thirds of the young men and women.  "Despite millennia of epidemics, war and famine, never before in history have death rates of this magnitude been seen among young adults," reports the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

Microbes and viruses are not the only unwanted global "travelers." Animals and plants, and insects have escaped their normal habitat and invaded other continents. A species of poisonous snake from Australia is currently colonizing Pacific islands, apparently by stowing away on aircraft. It has already exterminated practically all the forest birds of Guam.  The water hyacinth from South America has spread to 50 tropical countries, where it blocks canals and destroys fish ponds.  "Invading 'aliens' are costing the global economy possibly hundreds of billions of dollars every year as well as spreading diseases and causing massive ecological destruction," reports the international Herald Tribune.

Next time: The Globalization of Culture

From the Awake! magazine, 2002