Published 22 April 2020
Buckie Got It, St. Kitts and Nevis News Source
Global Health Security—A Call for Taiwan’s Inclusion
Dr. Chen Shih-chung
Minister of Health and Welfare
Republic of China (Taiwan)
The threat of emerging infectious diseases to global health and the economy, trade, and tourism has never abated. Pandemics can spread rapidly around the world because of the ease of international transportation. Among the most salient examples are the Spanish flu of 1918, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003, and the H1N1 influenza of 2009. Intermittently, serious regional epidemics, such as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012, Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and the Zika virus in Central and South America in 2016, have also reared their heads. Today, a novel form of pneumonia that first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019 and has since been classified as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a global pandemic. As of April 8, 2020, World Health Organization data shows that 1.35 million people had been confirmed as having the disease, with 79,235 deaths in 211 countries/areas/territories. Taiwan has not been spared.
