The text identifies one practical reason that this is the case, indicating that "One of the particularly threatening aspects of this compression of time is that people can now cross continents in periods of time shorter than the incubation periods of most diseases. This means that, in some cases, travelers can depart from their point of origin, arrive at their destination, and begin infecting people without even knowing that they are sick." (3) This means that an epidemic can be spread from multiple "ground zero" locations before it is even clear that the condition in question has come to reflect so significant a threat of proliferation. To the practical interests of preventing the disease's further spread, this denotes a real and substantial challenge to public health and safety administrators in the developed world. Quite to this point, the text reveals that the United States has experienced a greater level of infectious disease uptake in the last decade, a product both of its increasing proportion of immigrants and the speed with which such disease can be spread throughout the world. Naturally, we may make observations as to the ethical implications of an interest only heightened by the degree to which developed nations such as the U.S. are impacted, but it has truly raised consciousness about the correlation between global trade and the spread of infectious bacteria.
The idea that slowing down the pace of globalization may reduce the...
Indeed, though globalization has been a catalyst to this spread, the real cause should instead be regarded as the failure to proceed with globalization on truly equal terms. We may take as an example the grievance cited by the Health and Globalization report, which denotes that it is not specifically foreign labor but the intolerable conditions with which such labor is treated that stimulates the spread of disease. As the text denotes, compounding the problems of increased mobility of people and food-borne illnesses is a nexus between these two concerns within the United States. Within the food service industry in the United States, a high percentage of food preparation tasks are carried out by immigrants from developing countries where intestinal infections are endemic, and the new jobs immigrants hold often provide low wages, and little or no health insurance or paid sick leave." (12) Such agencies as the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund must be charged with the duties of equalizing labor conditions throughout the developing world so that the trade liberalization process diverges from the exploitive path which it has taken. Its parallels to the nature of colonialist of centuries past is illustrating not just a threat to the health of the developing world but, indeed, a serious danger to…
