CIA Transnational Health and Economic Activities - Patterns of Infectious Diseases

Patterns of Infectious Diseases

Broad advances in controlling or eradicating a growing number of infectious diseases—such as tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and smallpox—in the decades after World War II fueled hopes that the global infectious disease threat would be increasingly manageable. This optimism, however, led to complacency and overlooked the role of such factors as expanded trade and travel and growing microbial resistance to existing antibiotics in the spread of infectious diseases. According to the 1999 NIE,

  • Infectious diseases remain a leading cause of death. Of the estimated 54 million deaths worldwide in 1998, about one-fourth to one-third were due to infectious diseases, most of them in developing countries and among children globally.
  • Infectious diseases accounted for 41 percent of the global disease burden measured in terms of Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYS) that gauge the impact of both deaths and disabilities, as compared to 43 percent for noninfectious diseases and 16 percent for injuries.
  • Although there has been continuing progress in controlling some vaccine-preventable childhood diseases such as polio, neonatal tetanus, and measles, a White House-appointed interagency working group identified at least 29 previously unknown diseases that have appeared globally since 1973, many of them incurable, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, and hepatitis C. Most recently, Nipah encephalitis was identified. Twenty well-known diseases such as malaria, TB, cholera, and dengue have rebounded after a period of decline or spread to new regions, often in deadlier forms.
  • These trends are reflected in the United States as well, where annual infectious disease deaths have nearly doubled to some 170,000 since 1980 after reaching historic lows that year, while new and existing pathogens, such as HIV and West Nile virus, respectively, continue to enter U.S. borders.

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