ABSTRACT
The accelerated convergence of people associated with intensified globalization is transforming the health situation worldwide. Understanding what makes health a transnational security issue hinges on an awareness of evolution and ecological interdependence. Medical professionals are finding that the etiology of contemporary health security lies not in health
events of the last 150 years but rather stretches back 100,000 years to our human beginnings. The assumption was that scientific enterprise coupled with technological development would continue to successfully generate breathtaking advances in health care. This paradigm was premised on the belief that the 30-year increase in the human life span and the dramatic decline in the deadly diseases of smallpox, leprosy, and polio meant that the dangers of infections were a thing of the past. The U.S. Surgeon General announced in 1969 that the health battles of the future were to be waged, exclusively, against chronic and degenerative diseases, and problems of aging. Scientific technology that rapidly distinguished between different kinds of germs lent itself to diagnosis so rapid that the long-term damaging effects of many diseases were marginalized. The reigning epidemiological theory ushering in these advances was based on the fruition of a 19th century model, which witnessed a 150-year decline of infectious disease in North America and Europe and suggested that the diseases would simply disappear, especially as a country developed or modernized. The health situation appeared to be stabilized and even static in wealthy countries.
