Q&A
How WHO’s “One Health” Program Can Help India Tackle Monkeypox
With monkeypox being declared a global health emergency, the WHO approach is an innovative and effective way to curb outbreaks of zoonotic diseases.
· August 8, 2022
Carnegie seeks to understand how international actors, especially China and India, view the opportunities and risks of biotechnology, and to explore how to reduce the potential that evolving biotechnologies will be weaponized or otherwise used to cause harm.
With monkeypox being declared a global health emergency, the WHO approach is an innovative and effective way to curb outbreaks of zoonotic diseases.
In India, biotechnology has played an important role in helping stakeholders in academia, industry, and government develop new pandemic-related technology, from test kits to respiratory devices. But these biotechnology advancements can go further to strengthen India’s public health capacity.
India faces a host of biological risk factors. Drawing lessons from the coronavirus pandemic and prior biological disasters, India’s government should pursue new safety protocols and develop new institutions to manage future biological risk.
The global coronavirus response is providing a critical test bed for new technologies to detect, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases. But broader investments in public health are needed to capitalize on these advances.
A Chinese scientist dropped a bombshell in November 2018 when he unveiled the world’s first gene-edited babies. How are other countries, including India, navigating the dizzying array of rewards and risks associated with gene-editing research?
Crucial questions need to be asked with regards to fragmented legal frameworks, unclear regulatory practices ambiguous policy advances and voluntary measures governing gene-editing technologies at national and international levels.
Recent breakthroughs in gene editing have generated massive excitement, but they have also reenergized fears about weaponized pathogens.