miércoles, 27 de octubre de 2010

Globalization and diseases

Globalization and diseases
Globalization is driven and constrained by a number of forces: economic processes, technological developments, political influences, cultural and value systems, and social and natural environmental factors. There is much to be understood about how the wide-ranging changes are impacting on infectious diseases; there is an existing evidence between globalization and infectious diseases in terms of changes in disease distribution, transmission rate and, in some cases, management of disease.
Globalization, the flow of information, goods, capital and people across political and geographic boundaries, has helped to spread some of the deadliest infectious diseases known to humans. The spread of diseases across wide geographic scales has increased through history. Early diseases that spread from Asia to Europe were bubonic plague, influenza of various types, and similar infectious disease.
In the current era of globalization, the world is more interdependent than at any other time. Efficient and inexpensive transportation has left few places inaccessible, and increased global trade in agricultural products has brought more and more people into contact with animal diseases that have subsequently jumped species barriers.
Globalization intensified during the Age of Exploration, but trading routes had long been established between Asia and Europe, along which diseases were also transmitted. An increase in travel has helped spread diseases to natives of lands who had not previously been exposed. When a native population is infected with a new disease, where they have not developed antibodies through generations of previous exposure, the new disease tends to run rampant within the population.
To summarize this the etiology, the modern branch of science that deals with the causes of infectious disease, recognizes five major modes of disease transmission: airborne, waterborne, blood borne, by direct contact, and through vector (insects or other creatures that carry germs from one species to another). As humans began traveling overseas and across lands which were previously isolated, research suggests that diseases have been spread by all five transmission modes.

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