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From Isolationism to Mutual Vulnerability and Back: International Law and Unfair Distribution of Global Disease Burdens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2017
Abstract
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- Copyright © American Society of International Law 2001
References
1 Laurie Garret, The Coming Plague: Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance 619 (1994) [hereinafter the Coming Plague].
2 See Lee, Kelley & Dodgson, Richard, Globalization and Cholera: Implications for Global Governance., 6 Global Governance 213 (2000)Google Scholar.
3 Nakajima, Hiroshi, Global Disease Threats and Foreign Policy, 4 Brown J. World Aff. 319 (1997)Google Scholar.
4 See Fidler, David P., Return of the Fourth Horseman: Emerging Infectious Diseases and International Law, 81 Minn. L. Rev. 771 (1997)Google Scholar.
5 William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976).
6 Hippocrates, who lived on the Greek island of Cos, is often widely cited (not without controversy) in public health literature as the founder of modern medicine. Dorothy Porter, in Health, Civilisation and the State 15 argued that Hippocrates was probably an historical figure who lived some time between 460-361 B.C. His ancient biographers, including Aristotle and Plato, praised him as a great and honored physician, but it is uncertain whether he authored any of the collection of essays and text known as the Hippocratic Corpus. The Corpus was compiled by many authors and absorbed the traditions of many of the Greek medical communities. Hippocratic medicine radically departed from the religious and mystical traditions of healing and stressed that disease was a natural event not caused by supernatural forces. Hans Zlnsser, Rats, Lice and History: A Chronicle of Pestilence and Plagues (1963)] observed that Hippocrates probablywas not the first great physician of antiquity. It is likely that many skillful and sagacious medical men practiced in ancient Egypt where, according to Herodotus, physicians were even more highly specialized than they are today, since they often limited themselves to a single organ of the body. There were dentists as well as internists and surgeons. Hippocrates, however, is the first great physician from whom we have records and writings that show an approach to medical problems entirely analogous to our own.
7 J. N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History 8 (1998).
8 Zlnsser, supra note 6, at 111.
9 Neville Goodman, International Health Organizations and Their Work (1971).
10 CDC, Addressing Emerging Infectious Disease Threats: A Prevention Strategy For the United States (1994) ; see also WHO, World Health Report 1996: Fighting Disease, Fostering Development (1996) [hereinafter WHO Report 1996]. This definition includes new diseases that have emerged and previously known diseases that have either re-emerged in their traditional locations or in new parts of the world.
11 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Warren Rex, trans., Penguin Books 1954).
12 See Hays, supra note 7; see also Nakajima, supra note 3 (quoting the Coming Plague, supra note 1, arguing that plague from Asia reached Italy in 1347 after it spread from Mongolia across Asia) ; The path of the Black Death followed international travel and trading routes and subsequently spread to Europe and North Africa. See generally, Sheldon J. Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism 1-25 (1997) ; Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times 31-34 (1999).
13 Berlinguer, Giovanni, Health and Equity as a Primary Goal, 42 Development 18 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 See Porter, supra note 12 at 46; see also Berlinguer, supra note l3, at 18 (arguing that the discovery (or conquest) of America by Europeans—a turning point in history—meant also the transition from the separation of peoples and diseases to mutual interchange and communication. Until that time, differences in environmental conditions and nutritional patterns, in social and cultural organization, and in the presence or absence of biological agents and vectors of transmissible diseases had produced markedly different epidemiological trends in the Old and New Worlds. Indeed smallpox, measles, and yellow fever did not exist in the Americas, and syphilis was unknown in Eurasia and Africa).
15 Berlinguer, supra note 13, at 18.
16 See Hays, supra note 7, at 7.
17 For history of the concept of quarantine, see Mafart, B. & Perret, J. L., History of the Concept of Quarantine, 58 Med. Trop. 14–20 (March l998)Google Scholar (defining quarantine as a concept developed by society to protect against the outbreak of contagious disease) ; Goodman, supra note 9, at 29 asserts that “quarantine” is a word derived from the forty-day (quaranta) isolation period imposed at Venice in 1403 and said to be based on the period during which Jesus and Moses had remained in isolation in the desert.
18 Goodman, supra note 9.
19 Id.
20 Id. at 27.
21 Id.
22 See Javed Slddiqi, World Health and World Politics: The United World Health Organization and the UN System 14 (1995) (arguing that “the new ease of travel and trade also transformed hitherto foreign epidemic diseases such as cholera into European scourges. One early response of European states to limit the spread of cholera involved the quarantining of shipping at different ports for months at a time. Arbitrary and unequal quarantine regulations at various ports inevitably created great burdens on the international trade of. . . maritime nations such as Britain and France, whose fear of economic collapse overwhelmed their dread of imported disease and led them to support. . . international action to relieve shipping from the burdensome shackles of quarantine regulations.”).
23 The states included Italian city states then known as the four Papal states: Sardinia, Tuscany, and the Two Sicilies. Others were Austria, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and France—the convenor and host.
24 Paris in 1851, Paris in 1859, Constantinople in 1866, Vienna in 1874, Washington in 1881, Rome in 1885, Venice in 1892, Dresden in 1893, Paris in 1894, and Venice in 1897.
25 David P. Fidler, International Law and Infectious Diseases 24 (1999).
26 Id.
27 See National Science and Technology Council Committee on International Science, Engineering, And Technology Working Group on Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Diseases, Infectious Diseases: A Global Health Threat 14 (1995) [hereafter CISET Report]. The list of emerging diseases by CISET includes Ebola hemorrhagic fever (1977), Legionnaire ‘s disease (1977), toxic shock syndrome (1981), lyme disease (1982),AIDS (1983), and Brazilian hemorrhagic fever (1984). The CISET Report was adopted by World Health Organization in WHO Health Report 1996, supra notelO, at 112.
28 See WHO Health Report 1996 supra note 10, at 1.
29 Id.
30 Id.
31 CDC, supra note 10, at 3.
32 Alan R. Lifson identified eight similar factors that contribute to the spread of dengue across the world. These include international travel, urbanization, population growth, crowding, poverty, inadequate sanitation facilities, weak public health infrastructure, and lack of sustained support for disease-control measures. See Lifson, Alan R., Mosquitoes, Models, and Dengue, 347 Lancet 1201 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 WHO Health Report 1996, supra note 10, at 17.
34 Fidler, supra note 4, at 965.
35 Id.
36 Id.
37 Yach, Derek & Bettcher, Doug, The Globalization of Public Health, II: The Convergence of Self-interest and Altruism, 88 Am. J. Pub. Health 738 (1998)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
38 Institute of Medicine, America’s Vital Interest in Global Health: Protecting our People, Enhancing our Economy, And Advancing our International Interests (1997).
39 Id.
40 I borrowed this expression from Yach & Bettcher, supra note 37, at 740.
41 Nakajima, supra note 3, at 330.
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