ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a pocket genealogy of global health security organized through the World Health Organization (WHO) in the period from 1994 to 2005, one of the many global securities that were first invented in the 1990s. The impetus for the formation of global health security came from a 1992 national policy report, the US Institute of Medicine’s Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States. Emerging Infections reframed contagious disease prevention and control through the invention of a new disease concept, reemerging diseases that was cast as the most significant problem for public health in the United States and, by extension, the world. In October 1995 a new WHO division called Emerging and Other Communicable Diseases was established, with David Heymann as Founding Director, to lead WHO’s work in developing global alert and response.
