Diseases don't listen to reason. You can't ask for their passport. You can't arrest them. Think of security and images of computer hackers and terrorism might come to mind, but health security poses a far greater risk. And we're nowhere near prepared enough.
We face an unsettling future of bio-terrorism fuelled by engineered diseases as weapons of mass destruction. And Dr Alaa Murabit wants the world to get ready for the inevitable. She imagines that, in time, CRISPR could be used to genetically modify an ethic minorities, and it concerns her that few scientists are open about what they are researching.
According to data from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Britons are more concerned about the spread of infectious disease than they are about war. “We don’t have a blueprint on how to react appropriately,” says Murabit, who was among the speakers at WIRED Security in London in September. “The UK is one of the 10 global political leaders and so has an onus on itself to respond better.”
Read more: Ebola's ghost: the mystery after the outbreak
Nicknamed the “Libyan Doogie Howser” by comedian Jon Stewart, 27-year-old Murabit is the only UN High-Level Commissioner aged under 45. She attended medical school in Libya aged 15, and founded the gender equality advocate group The Voice of Libyan Women in 2011. In January 2016, Murabit became the youngest appointee of the 17 UN Global Sustainable Development Goal Advocates and earlier this year she was named executive director of security team Phase Minus 1.
And that's when she started looking into health security. Containment has always been the strategy when it comes to infectious disease; militaries were always mobilsed first, and people started to see them as an external threat. The issue? You can’t stop diseases at borders. Health was also used in traditional nation states as a tool to control, manipulate and to depopulate minorities, Murabit says.
Forced abortion was used in scientific studies to control the threat of an emerging minority population, and in the 1980s the LGBT community were blamed for HIV and AIDS. Following the Ebola outbreak in 2014, significant portions of the populations were too scared to get treatment.
Treating health pandemics as a matter of security creates political and public awareness, and funnels resources into the right areas. But this creates a problem: who gets to decide when you securitise something?
In 2014, 4,000 West Africans had died before Ebola was brought to the UN or the WHO as a global security concern – and that was because of the infection of two Americans. In that same year, 41 countries closed their borders, violating international health regulations. “Those countries have not been able to recuperate. And with economic destruction comes a lack of trust in the government,” Murabit says.
If citizens are fearful and mistrusting of the government, they are not going to listen to their health advice. “The challenge with any type of security concern is you can't parachute information in from the top and hope it distills down.”
This is why Murabit suggests we invest in local healthcare professionals and proactively strengthen healthcare institutions. “That means not sending in doctors from New York or Brussels, but instead asking people locally, 'What's working and what's not?',” she says. “Sending in foreign doctors has not traditionally been a positive thing.”
Secondly, Murabit advocates for the de-militarisation of pandemic response. When Ebola hit Sierra Leone, the government mobilised the army for the first time since the civil war. “If you're a citizen and you're already scared of Ebola, imagine how scared you would be then,” she says.
These solutions are obstructed by a lack of health care professionals, economic incentives to work in cities and stretched funding. “Ultimately, we need to start looking at health as a basic human right, and we don't.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
