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Nations must cooperate to stem health crises, U.N. says

GENEVA - With an estimated 2.1-billion airline passengers roaming the planet last year, infectious diseases are spreading faster than ever before, the U.N. health agency said Thursday.

The World Health Organization called on governments to follow its revised regulations for fighting dangerous health crises.

"New diseases are emerging at the historically unprecedented rate of one per year," WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said in an introduction to the annual World Health Report.

"It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like AIDS, another Ebola, or another SARS, sooner or later," the report said.

The thrust of WHO's efforts to protect global health has been the revision of the International Health Regulations, which came into effect in June. The voluntary regulations govern how countries should report potentially dangerous health emergencies to WHO.

While the regulations are meant to improve disease reporting worldwide, it is uncertain how much influence they actually have. While the governments of WHO's 193 member states would ideally be the first source of information in any outbreak, that is often not the case. Nearly half of all of WHO's outbreak alerts come from the media and are then followed up by affected countries.

WHO's annual report also urges countries to share viruses to help develop vaccines and to tighten domestic efforts to combat disease outbreaks.

But while Indonesia has said it would send human bird flu virus samples to WHO, it has not fully shared the samples. China stopped sharing H5N1 specimens with WHO for almost a year before sending samples in June, while Vietnam said it has encountered shipping roadblocks.

In 1951, when WHO issued its first set of health regulations to prevent the international spread of diseases, the situation was stable, the report said. People traveled by ship, slowing the spread of diseases around the world, and new diseases were rare.

But today, high volumes of people can quickly travel worldwide, meaning an outbreak or epidemic in any part of the planet is only a few hours away from becoming an imminent threat somewhere else, the report said.

[Last modified August 23, 2007, 01:24:07]