A good "click" for climate changes around the world

Dear Eco Friends,

The BBC has provided a good map for an easy click to dicover climate change around the world. Try it yourself: Climate change around the world

Howard

World Health Day 2007

Today (April 7th) is the World Health Day. Its 2007 theme is "Invest in health, build a safer future". The concerned messages are:
1. Invest in health, build a safer future.
2. Threats to health know no borders.
3. Health leads to security; insecurity leads to poor health.
4. Preparedness and quick response improve international health security.
5. The World Health Organization is making the world more secure

Coincidentally, the World Health Organization was also established 59 years ago on 7 April 1948. The World Health theme 2007 is somehow related to some of the Millennium Development Goals adopted unanimously at the 2000 U.N. Millennium Assembly, namely,

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. By 2015, reduce by half both the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day and the share suffering from hunger.
• Reduce child mortality. By 2015, reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under five;
• Improve maternal health. By 2015, reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality rate.
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases by 2015.
• Ensure environmental sustainability. Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources. By 2015, cut in half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation. By 2020, improve significantly the lives of 100 million slum dwellers.
  

The interesting question here is: Can the various UN assemblies and committees work in a truly collaborative and synergistic manner to reach their goals? Otherwise, things could be dragged in a discord owing to bureaucracies and ambiguous accountabilities much after the fashion of the ineffectiveness in dealing with cross-border pollution among government bureaus in Hong Kong.

Call for Action by Dr Margaret Chan

The following is an abstract of Margaret Chan's speech delivered on April 2nd during World Health Day debate on international health security held in Singapore.

"We live in a world where threats to health arise from the speed and volume of air travel, the way we produce and trade food, the way we use and misuse antibiotics, and the way we manage the environment. All of these activities have intensified the chance of outbreaks of epidemic-prone diseases. Outbreaks today are larger in two ways. First, changes in the way humanity inhabits the planet have led to the emergence of new diseases in unprecedented numbers. In the thirty years from 1973 to 2003, when SARS appeared, 39 pathogenic agents capable of causing human disease were newly identified. Among them are Ebola, HIV/AIDS, legionnaire's disease, Hanta virus, Hendra virus, Nipah virus, and H5N1 avian influenza. This is an ominous trend. It is historically unprecedented, and it is certain to continue.

Second, people are highly mobile and interconnected in the 21st century. SARS taught us how quickly a new disease can spread along the routes of international air travel. Financial markets are closely intertwined. These trends mean that the disruption caused by an outbreak in one part of the world can quickly ricochet throughout the global financial and business systems.
In June 2007, the revised International Health Regulations will come into force. For the first time, WHO is authorized to act on media reports to request verification and offer collaboration to an affected country. If this offer is refused, WHO can alert the world to an emergency of international concern using information other than official government notifications.

Population growth, urbanization trends and unsanitary conditions in many parts of the world create ideal conditions for explosive epidemics of well-known diseases, such as yellow fever and dengue. Environmental degradation and changing weather patterns allow known diseases to flare up in unexpected places, at unexpected times, and with unprecedented numbers of cases. Today, mainstay drugs fail much faster than the pace of development of replacement drugs. Such threats reinforce our need for shared responsibility and collective action in the face of universal vulnerability, in sectors well beyond health."