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In 1993, it was estimated that 500 million people crossed international borders on airplanes. By the year 2010, international tourist arrivals reached an estimated 940 million people. This was a 6.6 percent increase from 2009. Although the recent economic crisis affected these numbers in 2009, the 2010 statistic made up for the decrease and was higher that 2008’s peak.6
In the same way that ancient caravans and seagoing vessels carried illnesses from city to city, modern transportation systems do the same thing, only at a vastly greater speed. According to the World Tourism Organization (WTO), by 2020, the number of people crossing international borders is expected to increase even more, exceeding 1.5 billion per year.
Source: UNWTO Highlights 2011 Edition
An example of this rapid diffusion could be seen in the early 1990s, when a particularly dangerous strain of streptococus pneumoniae, first detected in Spain, was subsequently tracked to have spread throughout the world within only a few weeks (NIE, 2000).
Increased international travel is also believed to have played a major role in the spread of HIV/AIDS. Some virologists suspect that the HIV virus originated in West Africa. Some evidence suggests that the virus was present there, at very low levels, for perhaps as long as one hundred years before the disease reached epidemic proportions and was officially isolated by scientists in 1983 (Krause). And with the building of the trans-continental highway from Point-Noire, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) to Mombasa, Kenya, came vast new opportunities for the spread of the disease. Epidemiologists speculate that truck drivers along this highway carried the virus into the general population.
Global travel is a factor not only because of the increased dispersion of contagions, but also because transit itself often contributes to the spread of disease. Many health professionals are concerned that the confined, re-circulated air on airplanes may pose a significant threat to passengers for contracting diseases such as tuberculosis, which is both airborne and extremely contagious.
It is important to note that the transmission routes of infectious diseases do not run exclusively from poorer countries to richer ones. In fact, when measured in terms of the impacts on populations, the reverse is more likely to be the case. Historically, when people of developed countries begin to come into contact with traditional or developing societies, it is the health of people from traditional or developing states that tends to be impacted most severely.
6 Source: http://mkt.unwto.org/en/content/tourism-highlights
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