9 - Health Security Challenges in Asia: New Agendas for Strengthening Regional Cooperation in Health Security

Summary

Introduction

Much has changed in Asia's security environment as new security challenges emerge. This change can be clearly seen in the health security arena where new patterns of communicable and non-communicable diseases are significantly shifting the regional and global health agendas. Emerging types of diseases pose serious challenges in the ability of national and regional health systems to address them and to promote a healthy regional community.

The goal of promoting health security is particularly critical to a region that faced one of the most serious health threats in modern times. In 2003, the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an unknown highly pathogenic infectious influenza virus, caught the region by surprise. What started as an infectious disease outbreak in China's Guangdong province quickly evolved into a global health crisis which spread across the globe and reached as far as North America and Europe. Since then, much attention has focused on preventing the outbreak of highly pathological influenza pandemics and spread of similar virulent viruses like the avian influenza strains of H1-H5N1, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

While regional and global efforts have been focused on dealing with novel trains of influenza pandemic, new concerns about climate related health risks are also gaining more attention globally. From the increase in numbers and greater geographical spread of waterborne diseases like severe diarrhoeal diseases, typhoid and cholera to vector-borne diseases like Zika and Lyme disease as a result of rapidly changing climate, worries about the capacity of national health systems to deal with these growing risks to human health. In 2016, Zika emerged as the most recent infectious disease to be declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC). For developing countries, particularly those in the tropics, health concerns are further compounded by the steady rise of endemic communicable diseases like dengue and malaria that now have longer transmission season due to climate change. Added to these new trends in human health risks are also the changing patterns of infectious diseases like tuberculosis which are drug resistant, as well as the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance.