Dealing with epidemics of the future

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an interesting book "The Age of the Unthinkable: Why The New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And what We Can Do About It" by Joshua Ramo. His take on the recent swine flu and how it portends the future is fascinating as well and well worth pondering over

"…... The spread of swine flu looks similar to the financial flu that blitzed and crippled our banking system last year. It evokes the virus of Islamic fundamentalism that we now see infecting the planet at an ever-faster rate—and that is terrifyingly unresponsive to traditional medicines of politics or even the best surgical strikes…It’ a reminder that dangerous contagion abounds now, not just disease contagion. ... Here are the lessons I learned and how they fit with the larger problems the president now faces.

1. Virus risk is now everywhere—we can’t avoid it and live the way we want.
Maybe the most unnerving feature of our age is that the things we rely on to make life better often also make it more perilous. Airplanes, financial markets, computer webs—all of these bind us ever closer together and into shared webs of risk and danger. Scientists call dangers like these “systemic risks” because they emerge from the very way in which the system is organized. Any tightly bound network faces systemic risk, and the more closely a food web or financial web is linked, the more dangerous it becomes. In fact, in one of those weird quirks of our world, the more efficient a network is, the more dangerous it is—this is why financial markets are so efficient at blowing themselves up. Perturbations in linked nets spread with astonishing speed; crises in one area (think the sub-prime crisis) quickly turn into challenges in another (U.S.-China relations). The lesson: Obama has to begin to think and speak in terms of is preparing all of us for flu attacks of all kinds: financial, ideological and biological.

2. Think like an epidemiologist not a politician.
Confronted with big challenges—economic crisis, health disasters—the instinct of most politicians is to hack problems to pieces and then tackle them bit by bit with targeted legislation or departments or high-level envoys. But in an interconnected world that’s not enough. Every problem is linked to every other problem so our solutions need to be broad-based and aim not only at the particular problem (like bad lending practices) but also at the way these problems effect everything else. And that offers a crucial lesson for Obama: Systemic risk means that simply tacking the parts of a challenge—no matter how brilliantly you do so—can never be enough. In foreign policy terms this systemic sense is called a “Grand Strategy,” and it’s the thing most obviously missing from this very active presidency at the 100-day mark.

3. Even the best doctors can’t stop a pandemic alone.
What the president has built so far is an administration that looks like a health care system filled only with great doctors but without a plan for public health. Today there is no unifying principle that backs the work of aggressive diplomats like Richard Holbrooke or smart operational cabinet members like Janet Napolitano. In an age of unthinkable pandemic risk, that’s a dangerous problem. Without a grand strategy the ambitions of Obama’s Team of Rivals risk slipping into incoherent political struggle. And a big strategy hole like the one we have now encourages our enemies to mistake Obama’s valuable openness for indecisiveness. Worse, it makes it hard to progress in complex areas such as nuclear proliferation or trade and environment talks since we’ll never have a real plan for where to compromise and where to stand firm. And worst of all, we’ll be poorly prepared for other pandemics surprises that lie ahead.

4. The next 100 days: Build us an immune system.
What the Obama needs to deliver now isn’t a grand strategy in the old-school style of the Monroe Doctrine but rather one that looks like a global immune system: fast-moving, capable of quickly working across traditional lines to confront problems, flexible, and with power and responsibility widely distributed. Many of our enemies have such an immune system. For my book, I spent time with Hizballah. Their resilience in the face of Israeli attack is famous.
Building an immune system for the United States would be a political boost to Obama, helping to reinforce ideas he holds most strongly. Epidemic theory—which studies everything from runs on banks to forest fires—teaches that it’s vital to focus on the weakest, most vulnerable links in a networked system, a lesson that supports Obama’s actions on poverty and on narrowing the rich-poor gap. Another epidemic crisis principle is the importance of resilience, of the ability of a system to withstand challenge and get stronger—an idea that transforms Obama’s focus on infrastructure, education and health care from “nice to have” reforms into urgent priorities. An immune system grand strategy would also help end the debate about if Obama is “doing too much.” Confronted with the potential of more destabilizing infections, we can never “do too much” to boost our immunity."