Download Hi, my name is Cynthia Kornhauser, and I will be talking about how

Hi, my name is Cynthia Kornhauser, and I will be talking about how globalization puts
your health at risk through the spread of infectious diseases. I will begin by explaining how
globalization increases the spread of infectious diseases, and then I will talk about the current
methods and their associated problems for controlling these diseases.
Globalization is the interconnectedness among people around the world. This
connectedness gives us benefits such as access to goods from other countries, but globalization
of trade and people migration also allows diseases to be transmitted across borders. Beginning in
the 1920s and 1930s, the airplane metaphorically shrank the world because it allowed places
across the world to be closer in time to one another (Budd, Bell, and Brown 428). With
airplane’s rapid speed of travel, diseases with short incubation periods, like influenza, can spread
across the world (Barnett and Walker 1448). According to Google, incubation period is defined
as the time between being exposed to an infection and the appearance of symptoms. Therefore,
people within the incubation period of a disease could be considered clinically healthy, but they
would still be carrying the disease and potentially infecting others. In 2003, for example, the
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus quickly travelled from East Asia to over 25
countries along the airline networks (Budd, Bell, and Brown 427).
There are international and national regulations for controlling the spread of infectious
diseases. On the international level, the World Health Organization’s constitution promotes
health and prevents disease within sovereign nations. For instance, WHO had a smallpox
eradication campaign (Budd, Bell, and Brown 427). On the national level, the United States and
Canada have immunization programs that have lowered the levels of vaccine-preventable
diseases, such as measles, mumps, polio, and hepatitis A, in their population (Barnett and Walker
1449). However, a negative consequence of vaccine-preventable diseases being reduced is that
health care workers are less familiar with those diseases’ signs and symptoms, so this leads to a
delay in diagnosis and treatment of these infectious diseases (Barnett and Walker 1449). When
people unknowingly have infectious diseases, they are increasing the transmission of this
diseases to others. Also, a person may choose not to be vaccinated or vaccinate their child
because of personal beliefs about the safety and benefits of vaccines (Suk et al. 25287). Varying
personal ideas about vaccines may be tied to cultural and religious beliefs, which relates to
Samuel P. Huntington’s idea about the clash of civilizations. Different cultural beliefs about
vaccination could cause conflicts between countries in how to best protect people from infectious
diseases.
To recap, I have explained how the quickness of air travel has increased the spread of
infectious diseases within their incubation periods, and the implementation of vaccines has
reduced this spreading. However, vaccination alone is not a solution because (1) everyone in the
world is not vaccinated, and (2) not all infectious diseases have vaccines. There is no easy
solution to this problem, but I think that the idea of preventing infectious diseases through
vaccination needs to be globalized across cultural/personal beliefs, and world-wide education
needs to occur, so everyone can recognize the signs of the less frequent, vaccine-preventable
diseases. Thank you.
Work Cited
Barnett, Elizabeth D., and Patricia F Walker. “Role of Immigrants and Migrants in Emerging
Infectious Diseases.” The Medical Clinics of North America 92.6 (2008): 1447-58.
Medline. Web. 4 Oct. 2016.
Budd, Lucy, Morag Bell, and Tim Brown. “Of Plaques, Planes, and Politics: Controlling the
Global Spread of Infectious Diseases by Air.” Political Geography 28.7 (2009):426-35.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 4 Oct. 2016.
Gushulak, Brain D., and Douglas W. MacPherson. “Population Mobility and Infectious Diseases:
The Diminishing Impact of Classical Infectious Diseases and New Approaches for the
21st Century.” Clinical Infectious Diseases: An Official Publication of the Infectious
Diseases Society of America 31.3 (2000): 776-80. Medline. Web. 4 Oct. 2016.
Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs. 72.3 (1993): 41-8. Print.
Suk, Jonathan E., et al. “The Interconnected and Cross-Border Nature of Risks Posed by
Infectious Diseases.” Global Health Action 7 (2014): 25287. Medline. Web. 4 Oct. 2016.