Global Issues/Worldofchallengespandemics

The threat of a pandemic regularly features in the news. The ability of pathogens to cross borders, and the rapid speed of international travel in the modern world, make pandemics a pressing global issue.

In some cases, threatened pandemics do not transpire to be as dire as predicted, such as SARS and MERS. In other cases, such as Ebola, deaths have rapidly escalated and the pathogen very quickly spread. Moreover, the 1918 flu pandemic, in which around 50 million people died, highlights that the potential lethality of a pandemic should not be underestimated.

In this module, we examine the issue of pandemics through a video and a reading.

Watch:

'Larry Brilliant: TED Prize wish: Help stop the next pandemic'

Read:

Institute of Development Studies, ‘Global Governance and the Limits of Health Security’, Practice Paper in Brief 17, February 2015, Available at:

http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/123456789/5850/ID558%20Online.pdf;jsessionid=F40303B7A62058FD4D9EBB9C5ED8EA66?sequence=1