In his book, Pandemics, Pills, and Politics: Governing Global Health Security, Dr. Stefan Elbe calls the beginning of the 21st century an “epidemic of epidemics.” Since the beginning of the millennium, we have seen various outbreaks around the world with devastating health and economic impacts including HIV/AIDS, SARS, H5N1, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, and Zika. Earlier this year, Dr. Elbe, Director of the Centre for Global Health Policy at the University of Sussex, came to the LSE to discuss his findings from his book and how medical countermeasures may be used to combat and prevent global health emergencies resulting from the outbreak of lethal infectious diseases.
The demand for medical countermeasures—pharmaceutical defenses to deal with infectious disease outbreaks—is rapidly growing and developing today. It’s no wonder that politicians, scientists, health professionals, and economists are concerned: in our globalised world where a pathogen can easily spread onto any continent in just 36 hours with air travel, there is potential for health and economic disaster if we face a widespread pandemic. In just a six-month timespan, not only were hundreds of lives lost to SARS, but the globe also faced an economic loss of between $30-50 billion. Projections for economic loss in the event of a severe pandemic are around $570 billion—about 0.7 percent of the world’s income. In recent decades we’ve seen naturally occurring disease outbreaks, but there is increasing worry over potential bioterrorism attacks as well as increasing infection spread with anti-microbial resistance.
Medical countermeasures to infectious disease outbreak thus are an important development with huge potential. The medical countermeasures field is peculiar in that it combines the medical community and the security & defense community. In his lecture, Dr. Elbe explored the unique innovative field of medical countermeasures and discussed some of the key challenges that the field faces.
You can listen to Dr. Elbe’s talk again as a podcast here.