Wind farm worries

The report also highlights the use of smallpox in bioterrorism as a particularly worrying threat. Authorities around the world should work together to combat the kind of bioterrorism that occurred with the letters warning of anthrax after September 11 2001, it says. A flu pandemic would affect more than 1.5 billion people, or 25 per cent of the world's population. Even if the disease was mild in itself the economic and social disruption would be " enormous ". The WHO report adds: " It would be extremely naïve and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like Aids, another Ebola, or another Sars, sooner or later. " To prepare for these events will take unprecedented global and political collaboration, it advises. " No single country, however capable, wealthy or technologically advanced, can alone prevent, detect and respond to all public health threats. " The organisation is calling for renewed international efforts to share information. The WHO recommends renewed efforts to strengthen global cooperation in surveillance and outbreak alert and the response between governments, United Nations agencies, private sector industries and organisations. It believes there is growing need for the open sharing of knowledge, technology and materials, including viruses and other laboratory samples. " The struggle for global public health security will be lost if vaccines, treatment regimes, and facilities and diagnostics are only available to the wealthy, " the report says. Worries about the effects of international travel were underscored in June when a US national who had a contagious and deadly strain of tuberculosis, took a transatlantic trip. US authorities eventually tracked every passenger who had shared one of the two transatlantic flights taken by the TB patient. He had travelled via Canada to avoid US officials who would have sought to prevent his journey. In South Africa, the courts have considered forcibly detaining people who have the same form of TB to prevent its spread, amid fears that many more than those officially diagnosed are suffering and have not informed the authorities. The WHO's protracted battle with Indonesia over the H5N1 bird flu virus, the strain needed to develop a vaccine, underlines the difficulty of combating global health crises without international cooperation. Indonesia is the country hardest hit by human avian influenza, suffering 81 of the 192 fatalities reported in the past four years with recent occurrences on the island of Bali, which is popular …