MANKIND is on the brink of a global crisis as new and re emerging infectious diseases sweep across the world, international health experts said yesterday.
Complacency on the part of the international community has allowed diseases to attack on multiple fronts, and immediate action on a global scale is needed to combat the threat, the World Health Organisation warns in its annual report.
The report shows that of the 52 million people in the world who died last year, 17 million - including more than nine million children - were killed by infectious diseases. By comparison, cancer killed about 6.6 million people last year.
Major diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, which once seemed to have been subdued were "fighting back with renewed ferocity", said the report.
Some, including cholera and yellow fever, were now striking in regions previously thought to be safer from them.
In addition deadly new diseases such as Ebola are emerging at a frightening rate. At least 30 have been recorded in the last 20 years.
The sinister role of hepatitis viruses and other infectious agents in the development of many types of cancer was becoming increasingly evident. The problems are said to be caused chiefly by increasing population, ease of travel and urbanisation.
Optimism that many of the diseases could easily be brought under control had led to a "fatal complacency among the international community", the WHO director general, Dr Hiroshi Nakajima, said.
Dr Nakajima added: "This complacency is now costing millions of lives - lives that we have the knowledge and the means to save, yet we are allowing to trickle through our fingers."
But it was not all bad news. A number of the world's most serious diseases were on the retreat, and before long polio, leprosy, and several other diseases were expected to follow smallpox into extinction.
The report listed last year's 10 biggest infectious killers as:
Pneumonia and other respiratory infections (killed 4.4 million people); cholera, typhoid, dysentery (3.1 million); tuberculosis (3.1 million); malaria (2.1 million) hepatitis B (1.1 million); HIV/AIDS (1 million); measles (one million); neonatal tetanus (460,000); whooping cough (355,000), and intestinal worm diseases (135,000).