VIRUS GEOECONOMICS

Periodically, different regions of the world register epidemics of treacherous viruses of diverse origins, which easily get across state borders, from one continent to another and kill or cripple thousands of people. However, it is wrong to take this phenomenon as belonging solely to the domain of health care, because it can widely influence politics, economics and national security. It is not so much about the harm inflicted by the viruses as about the fear of them.

This year, mankind has once again been attacked by the already known swine flu virus (H1N1). Many countries - Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Ukraine, Iran and others - have casualties, according to local media. Reportedly, the disease develops rapidly and, quite frequently, medical aid comes just too late. The high risk group comprises children, elderly people, pregnant women and people with weakened immunity. In late January, world media have also sounded the alarm about a virus bearing the exotic name of Zika and transmitted by mosquitoes. This infection in itself does not lead to lethal outcomes or grave complications but it is very dangerous for pregnant women. If contagion occurs during the first three or four months, Zika may cause anomalies in the baby's development including microcephaly. The virus was first detected in rhesus macaques in Africa in 1947 but this year it has turned up in Brazil. The WHO has come up with a statement that Zika will spread over all countries in the Americas except Canada and Chile. Cases of contagion with the virus, mostly in tourists back from a journey, have been registered in Taiwan and in several EU member states: the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and others. Let it be recalled that earlier, in 2014, the world was in fear of Ebola fever for a few months. An epidemic outbreak with a high rate of mortality had occurred in Central and West Africa and it seemed to have begun to spread slowly all over the planet as individual occurrences had been registered in the USA, the UK, Germany and Canada. Before then, outbreaks of bird flue and swine flu had been registered in North America from where it started on its march.  

Why is so much attention always riveted on the viruses? After all, the number of their victims is not all that great compared to other global calamities. According to the WHO, the 2014-15 period saw 11,315 people die of Ebola fever. Thousands of people worldwide had been killed by previous outbreaks of the flu. As regards the present Zika virus, it follows from a recent report by the Health Ministry of Brazil that the number of newborns suspected of having microcephaly has increased to 4,180, although only 270 cases have been confirmed and only six of them related to Zika fever. 

Turning to figures, we can see that incomparably more people die of other causes. For example, according to data from the WHO, in 2012, non-infectious diseases caused 68 per cent of all lethal cases. For example, 1.5 million people died of diabetes, 6.7 million of stroke and 1.3 million were killed in road accidents. So why are the media and international organizations not showing as much concern about diabetes or heart diseases? Why are they not crying out about these as they are crying out about the hazard of swine flu or Ebola fever? Even among infectious diseases, there are much more insidious ones, in terms of fatality, than the hyped-up viruses. For instance, 438,000 people died of malaria in 2015, including 306,000 children. By the way, apart from Zika virus, microcephaly in an embryo can be caused by syphilis, toxoplasmosis, rubella, cytomegalovirus and herpes, which are much more widely spread infections than the exotic virus from Brazil.  

More than that, apart from ignoring simple statistical data, many media are gladly spreading about unverified facts. Thus, for instance, as regards Zika, they say that "WHO specialists do not say that the virus can be transmitted between humans". As a rule, they add that, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "there has been one report of possible spread through blood transfusion and one of possible spread through sex". As a result, fear of the virus is growing in geometric progression.   

So, who benefits, in this case, from all the noise around the hazards of swine flu, Ebola or Zika and other "incurable infections"? 

The most popular and logical answers to this question are habitually referred to the so-called "conspiracy theory" saying that pharmacological companies benefit from the viruses or, to be precise, not the viruses proper but vaccines produced for them. In 2010, the PACE described the swine flu outbreak as a false pandemic. It also announced that the EU country's authorities allowed their citizens to be baselessly scared, said Wolfgang Wodarg, the head of the PACE Health Committee. It is not that the flu is not dangerous or there are no lethal cases. It is dangerous and it does kill people but the number of those killed is incommensurable with the panic around those diseases. As of 11 June 2009, when the WHO officially announced the previous flu pandemic, more than 27,000 people had been infected by the virus worldwide and only 144 of them died.  

Meanwhile, in attempts to survive the epidemic, several billion dollars were spent to purchase Tamiflu, a medicine recommended by the WHO for flu treatment in 2009 and their reserves remained unused in some countries. In April 2014, the international non-commercial organization Cochrane Collaboration published a report from which it follows that the British authorities had spend hundreds of millions of dollars on that medicine, although its effect is hardly distinguishable from that of paracetamol. The Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, the Tamiflu maker, announced that it flatly disagreed with the expert report conclusions. Earlier Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's chief flu specialist, had dismissed all accusations by the PACE committee and emphasized that there are special mechanisms ensuring unbiased decision making inside the organization.    

By the way, by far not all hazardous diseases have their "antidotes". Zika and Ebola being first detected almost 70 years and 40 years ago, respectively, there are no vaccines developed for them up to this moment. Maybe this can be explained by the fact that the governments of African and Latin American countries where Ebola and Zika were discovered cannot purchase huge amounts of vaccines, while the likelihood of a massive spread of the diseases to Europe and North America is negligible. It is possible though that scientists really cannot develop a vaccine for Ebola and Zika as, for instance, they cannot create a medicine for cancer or AIDS. Nonetheless, the absence of a reliable remedy for their prevention or one for patients' full recovery does not mean that the disease will not be cured. It calls for a variety of medicines, too: chemotherapy for cancer patients, immunity maintenance for HIV-infected people, various medicines for flu symptoms and other viruses. The names of such medicines, like data on their efficiency, vary a lot but, judging by what is said in social networks, even healthy people are at a peak of hysteria over the pandemic and they are beginning to buy in medicines "as a reserve" and "for prophylactic use". 

It is no secret that pharmaceutics is one of the most profitable industries in the world economy. The biggest pharmacological companies, practically all of them being based in the USA, Japan, Israel, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland and other EU member states, gain billions of dollars. Apart from direct incomes, the Big Pharma supports other industrial sectors in the said advanced countries and it is also the biggest advertiser. This, in turn, enables them to keep their finger on the pulse of the world media market and thus form contemporary humans' picture of the day: what news they are getting, what fears are arising in them and how they are trying to cope with them. But not only this. The media depending on advertisers form their audience's ideological and political preferences. After such reflections, the idea that there is a link between big pharmaceutics and big economics and politics will not seem to be a ridiculous conspiracy theory. 

Meanwhile, the virus scare has other hidden capabilities. Has anybody ever assessed the damage caused to the education system of an individual country by the various preventive measures in schools and higher educational institutions? At the height of the current swine flu, almost all schools are closed in many regions of Russia. Georgian media write that, according to data as of 26 January, the flu made 180 Georgian schools suspend classes. In other "affected" countries, the situation is very similar. From bad to worse, scared by the Zika virus, local authorities in a number of Latin American countries, such as Salvador, Columbia and Brazil, have asked women to refrain from childbearing for two years. It seems, if the scared women heed this advice, such measures will have not the best effect on demography, economics and national security of those states. A virus may well be used as a means of external pressure. For example, Brazil has found itself in the centre of the epidemic but it is to host the Summer Olympics this year, in which the government has already invested a lot of money. Until recently, the Brazilian authorities were concealing the scale of the epidemic, Publico writes. But at the end of January, Brazil's Health Minister Marcelo Castro had to admit that "the country is losing the battle against the mosquito". Lastly, the escalation of fears around the diseases can very well distract people's attention from other problems. It is just now that a new wave of the world economic crisis is rising and its impact on people's lives is not at all positive. Yet the balance of all human interests will have health in the first place.

By the way, the pervious swine flu epidemic in 2009 also coincided with economic crisis.