Topic: Pandemic - CIAO Search Results

Author:: Filippa Lentzos
Publication Date:: 03-2016
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Connections
Institution:: Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes
Abstract:: The international community has laid down clear red lines about the use of biology to enhance national armaments. Advances in bioscience and biomedicine are, however, significantly eroding technological barriers to acquiring and using biological weapons. This article describes recent scientific trends and analyses their security implications. Three emerging fields of research that have particularly high potential for misuse are considered in more detail: potentially pandemic pathogens, synthetic biology and neurobiology. It is argued that continued efforts are required in multilateral, national and scientific spheres to strengthen the red lines and to foster responsible science.
Topic:: Science and Technology, Biological Weapons, Pandemic, Biology, and Medicine
Political Geography:: Global Focus

Author:: Robert Frau
Publication Date:: 11-2016
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:: The Ebola-Outbreak of 2014 has put international health law in the limelight. This contribution assesses the measures taken by the international community with regard to the outbreak of 2014 with a special focus on the World Health Organization and the UN Security Council. International law provides different actors with means to cooperate in order to fight the outbreak. The list of actors does not include the UN Security Council, which has addressed the outbreak in one resolution under chapter VII without taking any effective legal remedies. In addition, the relevant human right to health has not been addressed by actors, creating leeway in further emergencies.
Topic:: International Cooperation, United Nations, World Health Organization, Ebola, Public Health, and Pandemic
Political Geography:: Global Focus

Author:: Raymond A. Zilinskas, James W. Toppin, and Casey W. Mahoney
Publication Date:: 09-2013
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Abstract:: Throughout the 20th century, the USSR Ministry of Health’s 2nd Directorate headed an “anti-plague (AP) system” whose main objective was to protect the country from endemic and imported dread diseases such as plague, anthrax, and others. In addition, it had an important, two-phased role in the Soviet Union’s biological warfare (BW) program—to provide training to the BW program’s scientific workers on biosafety practices and to submit cultures of especially virulent pathogens to that program’s research and development institutions. Because the USSR considered information about endemic infectious disease, as well as BW-related activity, to be state secrets, hardly any outsiders knew about the AP system’s work and scientific accomplishments. To this day, the five Russian AP institutes remain closed to outsiders and are almost as secretive about their current activities as they were during the Soviet era.
Topic:: Health, Science and Technology, Public Health, Pandemic, and Medicine
Political Geography:: Europe and Soviet Union

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