Global Health Security and Diplomacy: Lessons Learned from Ebola and Zika
Date: Friday, October 13, 2017
Time: 8:00 – 9:00AM
Location: ICC Executive Conference Room
Next year will mark the centenary of one the 1918 Spanish Influenza – one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history. Although infectious disease experts believe that, on average, large scale pandemics occur about once per decade, there has been a 4 fold increase in the number of emerging infectious disease outbreaks in the past few decades. Global trends such as increasing globalization, urbanization, population displacement, and intrusion into new environments can promote the likelihood of infectious disease outbreaks, as we have seen with SARS in 2003, H5N1 in 2007, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2015, and re-emergence of Yellow Fever in 2016.
Ambassador Jimmy Kolker will lend a unique perspective about the political actions behind the response and control of disease outbreaks. He will discuss the importance of global health diplomacy in the response to the 2014 Ebola and 2015 Zika outbreaks, and what lessons may be applied in the response to future epidemics.
This event was a part of the Global Health Security Seminar Series, which is co-sponsored by Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security and the Global Health Initiative.