SARS managed to cripple some of the most dynamic cities in the world and is estimated to have led to a loss in global economic output of US$20–25 billion (World Bank, 2003), even though in purely public health terms SARS was not a particularly serious disease. While the anthrax attacks demonstrated the security fears raised by a bioterrorist event, the SARS epidemic in early 2003 demonstrated how disruptive a newly emerged virus could be in a globalized world. Canada hosted the first meeting in November 2001, where the ministers agreed ‘to forge a partnership to address issues of protecting public health and security globally’ and called for ‘global action to strengthen public health preparedness and response to the threat of international biological, chemical and radio-nuclear terrorism’ ( GHSI, 2001). The US Health Secretary, Tommy Thompson, led the creation of the Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI), which brought together the health ministers of the G7 countries, the European Union, with the WHO as a technical adviser. These US concerns were reflected at the global level. Fears that the anthrax attacks would be followed by a deliberate release of the smallpox virus in the United States and widespread news reports about the threat posed by smallpox served to draw public health into the discourse of national security and defence. The then US Secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, noted after the anthrax attacks that ‘only through a new union of our public health, police and military resources’ could the threat of bioterrorism be met (cited in Garrett, 2001, p. The anthrax attacks pushed along the process of securitization of emerging infectious diseases by blurring the distinctions between naturally occurring infectious diseases and deliberate acts of bioterrorism and placing the response to both within a security framework.
#WHAT DID CHIP HAILSTONE GO TO JAIL FOR SERIES#
If the circumstances described earlier created a context in which infectious diseases were seen as security threats, a series of events beginning with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and the anthrax attacks that followed seemed to provide confirmation of this threat and provided salience to the discourse that had been created earlier. Lending Salience to the Emerging Infectious Diseases World View: 9/11, Bioterrorism, SARS and H5N1 Avian Influenza It finally looks at the impact of securitization on countries with different priorities. It uses the Copenhagen School’s analysis to examine how avian and pandemic influenza was securitized in the United States and then uses the concept of framing to examine why this disease was securitized by looking at the prior existence of an issue culture or discourse around emerging infectious diseases, which gained salience after the 2011 anthrax attacks. The article argues that for an issue to be securitized as a global health threat, it is essential that the United States takes the lead role (or at the very least supports efforts by other leading powers). Developing countries with other disease priorities were urged to pour resources into pandemic planning exercises and change poultry-raising practices. The influenza pandemic of 2009 turned out to be far milder than anticipated, and much of the scientific basis on which planning had proceeded and resources had been mobilized turned out to be wrong. The securitization of influenza was not unproblematic. A disease that for decades had languished in the ‘dull but worthy’ category of infectious diseases was elevated to a risk to global health security. The period beginning in 2004 saw an extraordinary spurt in attention paid to avian and pandemic influenza in the United States and at the global level.
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