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Jayanthi Iyengar

The US President, Mr George W. Bush... inoculating the world against viruses.

DURING the period when public attention has been focussed on the politics in South Asia, several global developments have taken place that bring home the fact that public health and developmental spending would soon have to be clubbed with defence expenditure.

At one level, the Bush administration is pushing for a $1.3-billion foreign development assistance before the US Congress. The sum would be used for pro-growth foreign developmental expenditure and for targeting HIV/AIDS globally. The proposed $1.3 billion in 2003, which is a large enough bill, would be upped over the next three years to $5 billion annually, if the Congress permits it.

The Bush administration's paranoia with HIV/AIDS is known. Ever since the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) identified HIV/AIDS to be the next biggest risk to Homeland security, the US administration's concentration has been on tackling the problem globally. Independent experts have further predicted that the epicentre of the pandemic could shift within the next five years from Africa to Eurasia (India, China plus Russia), which has made the Bush administration even more nervous.

The SARS epidemic has already proved how fast an epidemic can spread in the age of air travel. It has also underlined the weak underbelly of the Western nations, which till now associated infectious diseases with poverty and lack of public health infrastructure.

Adding a new dimension today to global affairs are such terrorist acts as the first biochemical attack in Florida 2001 and parallel mail attacks in Washington D.C., New York and Connecticut, using the anthrax virus, which led to five deaths and 17 injuries. This has forced nations to view public health and developmental expenditure as a national concern and bio-chemical warfare as potential threat to national security. Since September 11, the US administration has taken this underlying principle further to mean lack of development and poor public health anywhere in the world to mean a threat to its own national security.

With this is mind, it has started pumping in aid into Africa to tackle AIDS. It also has started to address poverty in that continent by launching IT literacy programmes to bridge the digital divide.

Critics in developing nations have already started attacking the US administration's AIDS funding as a new mode for global dominance, but some of the Bush administration's fears are being strengthened by recent research findings.

Just last week, scientists genome mapped the anthrax and SARS viruses. Further, Beijing, which is at the epicentre of the SARS epidemic, reluctantly confessed for the need for additional government spend on public health. Both these developments provide the linkages between public health and global security concerns.

The research into genome mapping, particularly of the anthrax virus, is being led by the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and its collaborators. The TIGR project, started in 1999, is supported by the US Office of Naval Research, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the US Department of Energy, and the United Kingdom's Defence Sciences Technology Laboratory (DSTL), apart from several institutions of learning in the US and the UK. To that extent, the developments on the anthrax genome mapping front have to be viewed as US military research and this element would have to be factored in while evaluating the merits of the findings.

The anthrax study, published in the May 1, 2003 issue of Nature magazine, shows B. anthracis to be similar in structure to the common soil bacteria, B. cereus. Only, the maximum harm that the latter can do is sometimes cause food poisoning. B. anthracis, however, is another matter. It has two chromosomes, which give it its virulence. The DNA sequencing also reveals the presence of the plague bacterium called Yersinia pestis in the B. anthracis strand, which makes B. anthracis a deadly cocktail.

Further, another information revealed is that the virus' virulence probably comes from horizontal gene exchanges, rather than from mutations within the genome. Previous research by TIGR has demonstrated the similarity in the genetic structure of the anthrax used in the Florida attack in 2001. All this adds to a composite picture: The B. anthracis is a common garden bug gone bad. Only, it probably received a healthy shove from the human hand to embark on its virulent journey.

While the anthrax sequencing was being quietly released, two teams of scientists, one from Canada and other from the US proclaimed with fanfare that they had completed the first peer-reviewed studies of the genomic sequencing of the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus. Both teams worked on different strains of the SARS virus, but their findings were similar. They confirm that SARS is a new variety of coronavirus.

The finding is supposed to speed the discovery, cure and control of SARS, but purely from a policy perspective, it is clear that a tough code of conduct is now necessary on bio-chemical research. Further, governments need to factor in the fact that infectious diseases are no longer a matter of national but a global concern. Simultaneously, countries will henceforth also have to tackle infectious diseases on a war footing, treating health allocations on a par with defence and national security spending, failing which countries would have to face what has happened to China.

To illustrate, just a month ago, soon after China posted a 9.9 per cent growth in the first quarter, global investors, who had so much riding on China had a new worry: Could China be so overheated that it was a bubble ready to burst? Within a month, the scene had changed. The World Bank has scaled down growth projections for the country to 7.5 per cent, but independent analysts have not been that conservative.

Bankers say the risk premiums are down for India, which has been given a clean chit by the WHO, while they are up for China, changing overnight the definition of the most attractive investment destination in Asia. Such is the nature of global business and such is the role of public health in global trade. Nations will now have review their own perceptions to health and development.

(The author, a freelance writer, can be contacted at jayanthiiyengar1@ yahoo.com)

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