International trade spreads deadly infectious diseases

Growing international trade and travel has increased the risk of spreading deadly infectious diseases like Ebola, MERS and AIDS, a new study has found.
"The recent Ebola outbreak made us realise that we are all just a plane ride away from exposure to emerging infectious diseases," said Charles Perrings, a professor at the Arizona State University in US.
Perrings described the growth of international trade since the 1950s and the increasingly tight coupling of developed and developing economies.
The study considered how the global community currently deals with trade-related infectious disease risks of animals and plants, and asks how the system could be made more effective.

An example of the impact of an infectious disease came in 2001 in the UK when an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease cost some USD 10 billion and more than 2 million sheep and cattle had to be destroyed, Perrings said.
More recently, African swine fever - a much more serious disease of pigs - has been spread in the Caucasus region through trade in pork, pork product or through waste in trade vehicles.

"The more trade grows as a proportion of global production, the more likely it is that diseases will be spread through trade, and the higher the economic cost of resulting trade bans," Perrings said.

"In addition many infectious diseases that affect animals also affect people," he said.
"Zoonoses like SARS, MERS, HIV AIDS, or highly pathogenic avian influenza, all originated in wild animals and were then spread person to person through trade and travel," he said.
Perrings said current instruments to control infectious diseases are far from adequate.
"There are two problems to address. One is that disease spread is an unintended (external) effect of trade. To solve this problem exporters and importers need to be confronted with the risks they impose on consumers," Perrings said.
"The other is that the control of infectious disease is a public good - the benefits it offers are freely available to all, and so will be undersupplied if left to the market," he said.

"To solve this problem we need to undertake cooperative, collective control of infectious diseases at the source," he said.
Perrings said options for solving both problems include the use of payments for risk reduction in developing countries and the development of a global fund for infectious disease control.
The study was published in the journal Food Security.