Towards a Safer World

Author: Dr. Sok Touch, MBDS Regional Moderator, Cambodia

Community Resilience to Emerging Infectious Diseases as part of local disaster risk reduction in Cambodia

Emerging diseases pose a most challenging threat to both the health system in the affected countries and the community at large especially when pandemic becomes a disaster. To cope with this situation, health and community system need to be reoriented to deal with a specific situation while being better prepared for similar threats or foreseeable conditions in the future.

Senior UN System Coordinator for Ebola Virus Disease, David Nabarro, talks with UN News Centre about efforts to contain unprecedented outbreak in West Africa. UN Photo/Mark Garten

20 August 2014 – As the World Health Organization (WHO) ramps up its response to the unprecedented outbreak of the Ebola virus disease in West Africa, the wider United Nations, led by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, has launched a system-wide coordination initiative to assist Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone in their efforts to halt the spread of the virus, which has left more than 1,000 people dead and is now affecting more than 1 million people throughout the region.

4 Aug 2014 - New research, the African Livestock Futures Study investigating plausible trajectories for African livestock up to 2050, indicates potential for growth in livestock production and demand in Africa, contributing greatly to wealth, employment, economic growth as well as to the resilience and productivity of producers’ livelihoods, and to the food security, nutrition and sustainable development of all.

The Index for Risk Management - InfoRM - is a way to understand and measure the risk of humanitarian crises and how the conditions that lead to them affect sustainable development. Such crises - the result of disasters, conflict and other drivers - affect tens of millions of people every year all over the world.

It is common knowledge that climate change particularly affects developing countries, but its effects on health are still very hard to predict. In a joint effort to bridge this gap, the QWECI project set out to assist medical practitioners and public health decision-makers in allocating resources and implementing preventative measures ahead of disease epidemics.

This paper issued by the policy drafting committee of Beyond 2015 for Conflict, Fragility & Disaster aims to shed lights on the efforts to develop the Post-2015 Development Agenda which was started by the UN (United Nations) almost two years ago and which included as well Sudan as has been published in this page before. 
 

For a long time people perceived climate change as an environmental issue–the concern of environmentalists, the concern of a few. It was reframed as a justice issue at the turn of the 21st century, when it became clear that those most likely to suffer the consequences of climate change were primarily those who had least contributed to its cause. Africa in particular has contributed little to the climate change crisis and yet is considered to be one of the regions most vulnerable to its effects.

The European Commission lays out its primary vision on how the European Union should contribute to the global efforts to reduce the impact of disasters.

This report asserts that the more widespread integration of science into disaster risk reduction policy making will depend on science being ‘useful, useable and used’. The case studies in the report describe specific examples of scientific learning being employed to enhance disaster risk reduction, providing evidence that science is useable for disaster risk reduction. The case studies were selected from across the breadth of scientific disciplines and from all parts of the globe.

Epidemic typhus is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Rickettsia prowazekii and transmitted by body lice (Pediculus humanus corporis). This disease occurs where conditions are crowded and unsanitary. This disease accompanied war, famine, and poverty for centuries.