By RICHARD SKOLNIK
White Rock

The health of anyone, anywhere, is the health of everyone, everywhere. Infectious diseases and resistance to antibiotics don’t respect boundaries. The whole world is in this together.

No country is adequately prepared to deal with disease threats, resistance to antibiotics or bio-terrorism. Two recent studies revealed how far we are from being ready to cope adequately with such threats.

Major threats to global health exist and may get worse. We have already faced SARS, MERS, Ebola, and resistance to many antibiotics. We had an anthrax scare. Coronavirus is our newest threat. Most of the scientific community expects a worldwide flu epidemic.

Climate change poses serious threats to the health of many populations, including our own. Climate change, therefore, has to be treated as a central issue for protecting our health, as well as protecting many other areas of life.

Threats to health have enormous economic consequences. Moreover, these costs depend more on people’s fear of the threat than with how many deaths the threat actually causes.

We need to fund NIH at the level needed to keep up with such threats. Otherwise, we risk yielding leadership in science to the Chinese and others and will be even less prepared in the future to face critical public health threats.

We need to ensure that CDC has the funds it needs to be the Disease Detectives of the World.

Without proper understanding of diseases and their spread, we cannot win the fight against these threats.

We need to ensure the highest possible levels of vaccination in our children and in our adults.

Vaccines work. They prevent people from getting sick and dying from infectious causes. They also prevent the growth of resistance to antibiotics.

We need to base our public health work on science and evidence. The US quarantine on Ebola was not evidence-based and hurt the fight against Ebola. Not vaccinating those seeking asylum in the US and other “detainees” is contrary to sound science and risks harming everyone’s health.

So, I repeat … the health of anyone, anywhere, is the health of everyone, everywhere. People need to vote for candidates who understand global health and its importance to our own population and the health or others. Those who don’t understand this will move us away from evidence-based approaches and in directions that will harm the health of the planet, the health of Americans, and the health of others.

Editor’s note: Richard Skolnik is the former regional director for health for South Asia at the World Bank. He was the director of an AIDS treatment program for Harvard and taught Global Health at the George Washington University and Yale. He is the author of Global Health 101 and the instructor for Yale/Coursera’s Essentials of Global Health.