Paul Wise watched as children ran around a playground attached to a health clinic at a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of Mosul — the northern city in Iraq once controlled by the Islamic State but now back in the hands of the Iraqi government.

The children had survived the Battle of Mosul, which had fallen to ISIS in 2014 but was retaken by the government forces and allied militias during a nine-month military campaign that ended in July. Many of the children suffer from physical and mental wounds and Wise wondered how they would recover with so little medical infrastructure.

Wise was part of a small delegation of physician-academics asked to evaluate a World Health Organization-led system to treat civilians injured in the Mosul fighting. Wise and his colleagues recently slipped into Mosul to visit field hospitals, review health care on the ground and determine whether there is a better way to distribute medical aid during armed conflict.

The visit left the Stanford Medicine professor of pediatrics and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies with questions about health care, humanitarian ethics, and conduct of war: Are there better ways to deliver emergency medical care during the height of battle? How do relief workers maintain neutrality when embedded with government security forces? Has the system of financing humanitarian interventions — one that was essentially created during the Cold War — become dangerously outdated?

Answering these questions is the mission of a new health-and-security initiative at Stanford led by Wise, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy who has spent 40 years working to improve the health of children impacted by conflict. Much of his work has been in Guatemala through his Children in Crisis project, the first university-based program to address the needs of children in areas of unstable governance and civil war.

“In talking with the groups that are running these humanitarian efforts in Mosul, there was this uneasiness, this kind of disorientation with the way things are now,” said Wise. “It was a kind of recognition that humanitarian norms are changing, the health personnel and facilities are at greater risk; the financial gap between humanitarian need and humanitarian capability is growing; and the old way of financing humanitarian intervention is inadequate, archaic.”

An Interdisciplinary Approach

Wise believes academics are well suited to help resolve these humanitarian conundrums.

“So we are going to move ahead and try to bring all the players together to reconsider this global challenge. Here at Stanford, we have the capacity to draw upon remarkable resources,” he said.

The new biosecurity initiative led by Stanford Medicine physician and FSI senior fellow, David Relman, together with world-renowned political scientists, security specialists, computer scientists and health policy experts will “attempt to craft new strategies for the provision of critical services to populations affected by conflict and political stability.”

The initiative will collaborate with other institutions such as Johns Hopkins, UCSF, Harvard, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It will also seek the engagement of partners committed to providing humanitarian services, including WHO, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“The voice of communities impacted by war should also be an essential element in this ambitious effort,” Wise said. “To break new ground, we’re going to have to do things differently; the health strategies need to take into consideration fundamental understanding of the political dynamics. But we have a special opportunity here at Stanford because we take an interdisciplinary approach.”

Children of War

Most of the children Wise saw will never be the same, he said, nor the humanitarian workers who risked their lives to treat them, their families, and fighters from all sides of the battle to oust the Islamic extremists from the city on the Tigris River.

“I look at these little kids with horrendous emotional trauma and PTSD, and I think to myself, it’s the collision of all these questions playing out within a 50-square-meter little playground,” he said. “It’s these broader, strategic and ethical questions that are really profound. And as a pediatrician who is dedicating the last phase of my career to these questions of security and the political dimensions — I have to engage on all of these levels. That’s not easy.”

Wise traveled with WHO officials, as well as Paul Spiegel, a physician who leads the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Adam Kushner, a trauma surgeon affiliated with Johns Hopkins; and Kent Garber, a surgical resident at UCLA and research associate at Johns Hopkins.

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Spiegel also believes academics are uniquely positioned to help assess the current system of responding to medical crises during conflict.

“I believe that we can bring objectivity and rigor to analyzing and evaluating important and innovative responses, such as the trauma response by WHO and others in Mosul,” Spiegel said. “Humanitarian organizations are often busy responding quickly to rapidly changing situations; they don’t always have the luxury of time to do what academic humanitarians can do.”

Making the two-hour drive from Erbil to Mosul in armored, bulletproof SUVs provided by the United Nations, they slipped into field hospitals to meet with Iraqi physicians and medical teams with the humanitarian agencies.

Wise, who was able to take a few photos and video on his smartphone, described the devastation on the ground, noting that not since the siege of Leningrad has a city of this size experienced such street-by-street fighting. In large parts of the city, virtually every building was bombed or bulleted. It will take years to clear the rubble and rebuild.

“It’s just a remarkable story of tragedy and resilience,” he said.

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Since the city was not long ago controlled by ISIS, the field hospitals are still surrounded by massive concrete barricades and tactical trucks stationed outside with mounted machine guns.

The team found that at the height of the battle for Mosul, there was tremendous pressure to treat injured civilians and discharge patients very quickly, due to the lack of medical infrastructure and personnel and the continuous wave of new injuries coming in.

“The charge for us was to evaluate the system and how well it worked, what ways could it be improved, how many lives that it saved,” Wise said. “One of the concerns, for example, was that in order to put in medical people that close to the frontline, you have to give them some kind of security. This raised issues among the humanitarians about their need for independence and neutrality, since you’re essentially embedding them with Iraqi security forces.”

Epidemiology and Ethics

“We are looking at the technical issues and the epidemiologic issues, but also dealing with the ethical issues and their implications,” he said.

They intend to write an internal report and then publish their findings in a major medical journal, to get the word out about the issue and gain support for ongoing collaborative work. They’re looking to partners like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which recently devoted an entire issue of its journal, Daedalus, to the factors and influences of contemporary civil war. One of the essays in that issue by Wise and his Stanford colleague, Dr. Michele Barry, who directs the Center for Innovation in Global Health, talks about the threat of a global pandemic as a potential byproduct of the 30 ongoing civil wars around the world.

“We’re trying to get the report completed quickly because the model of trauma care for civilians in Mosul is a new model and could be implemented in other combat areas, like the fighting in Syria and other places in Iraq,” Wise said.

Wise worries some see Stanford University as an insulated Silicon Valley institution in a beautiful setting and not always engaged in the real world.

“Well, this is about as engaged in the real world as you can get — this is Stanford moving and doing things out there, not just sitting around in seminar rooms. Sometimes you need to get close to the front lines to save lives,” he said.

When asked what surprised him during this trip to Mosul, Wise smiled.

“I’m sort of old and I’ve seen a lot of the world and not a lot surprises me anymore,” he said. “But it was a reminder of how desperate are the lives of millions of people — that we could do so much more. It’s a reminder of just how fragile physical security really is in this world."

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There are 30 civil wars underway around the globe, where civilians are dealing with death and destruction as well as public health emergencies exacerbated by the deadly march of conflict.

Yemen is battling an unprecedented cholera outbreak which has killed more than 2,150 people this year, with another 700,000 suspected cases of the water-borne disease. The government and a rival faction have been fighting for control of the country, taking 10,000 lives since 2015.

Some 17 children in Syria have been paralyzed from a confirmed polio outbreak in northeastern districts, with 48 cases reported in a country that had not had a case of polio since 1999. The cases are concentrated in areas controlled by opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.

And in the Democratic Republic of Congo — where the civil war officially ended years ago, but thousands of people still suffer from recurrent uprisings and scant infrastructure — a yellow fever outbreak was met last year with a lack of vaccines. The WHO was forced to give inoculations containing a fifth of the normal dose, providing protection for only one year.

And yet today, of the nearly 200 countries on this planet, only six nations — three rich ones and three poor ones — have taken steps to evaluate their ability to withstand a global pandemic.

“The bottom line is that despite the profound global threat of pandemics, there remains no global health mechanism to force parties to act in accordance with global health interests,” write FSI’s Paul Wise and Michele Barry in the Fall 2017 issue of Daedalus.

“There also persists inherent disincentives for countries to report an infectious outbreak early in its course,” the authors write. “The economic impact of such a report can be profound, particularly for countries heavily dependent upon tourism or international trade.”

China, for example, hesitated to report the SARS outbreak in 2002 for fear of instability during political transition and embarrassment over early mishandling of the outbreak. Reporting cases of the 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa were slow and the virus killed some 11,300 people in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia before the epidemic was declared over in January 2016.

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“Tragic delays in raising the alarm about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa were laid at the doorstep of the affected national authorities and the regional WHO committees, which were highly concerned about the economic and social implications of reporting an outbreak,” Wise and Barry write in the journal published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Daedalus issue, “Civil War & Global Disorder: Threats and Opportunity,” explores the

factors and influences of contemporary civil wars. The 12 essays look at the connection of intrastate strife and transnational terrorism, the limited ambitions of intervening powers, and the many direct and indirect consequences associated with weak states and civil wars.

“Wise and Barry, both medical doctors with extensive field experience in violence-prone developing countries, analyze the relationship between epidemics and intrastate warfare,” write FSI’s Karl Eikenberry and Stephen D. Krasner in their introduction to the issue that includes eight essays by Stanford University faculty.

“Their discussion is premised on the recognition that infectious pandemics can threaten the international order, and that state collapse and civil wars may elevate the risk that pandemics will break out,” they wrote.

Eikenberry and Krasner are hosting a panel discussion about the new volume of Daedalus with FSI senior scholars, including Wise and Barry, on Oct. 23. Members of the Stanford community and the public are invited and can RSVP here. Podcasts with the authors will also be available at FSI’s World Class site over the next few weeks.

Prevention, Detection and Response

Barry and Wise believe there is significant technical capacity to ensure that local infectious outbreaks are not transformed into global pandemics. But those outbreaks require some level of organized and effective governance — and political will.

Prevention, detection, and response are the keys to controlling the risk of a pandemic. Yet it’s almost impossible for these to coincide in areas of conflict.

Prevention includes solid immunization programs and efforts to reduce the risk of animal-to-human spillover associated with exposure to rodents, monkeys and bats.

Then, early detection of an infectious outbreak with pandemic potential is crucial, through a methodical surveillance structure to collect and test samples drawn from domestic and wild animals, a capacity sorely lacking in areas of conflict and weak governance.

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“Civil wars commonly disrupt traditional means of communication,” they write. “The Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa exposed glaring weaknesses in the global strategy to control pandemic outbreaks in areas with minimal public health capacity.”

New strategies that utilize satellite or other technology to link remote or insecure areas to surveillance are urgently needed, they said.

Then there is the response in countries where civil war not only makes it difficult, but politically treacherous.

In Syria, there had not been a case of polio reported since 1999. In 2013, health workers began to see children with the kind of paralysis that is associated with a highly contagious polio outbreak.

“However, the government and regional WHO office have been intensely criticized for their slow and uneven response,” the authors note, particularly the government’s resistance to mobilizing immunization efforts in areas sympathetic to opposition forces.

Pressure from international health organizations and neighbors in the region ultimately led to the reinstatement of vaccination campaigns throughout Syria.   

“The Syrian polio outbreak is an important reminder that health interventions, though technical in nature, can be transformed into political currency when certain conditions are met,” they write. “At the most basic level, the destruction or withholding of essential health capabilities can be used to coerce adversaries into political compliance, if not complete submission.”

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Strengthening Global Oversight

The only comprehensive global framework for pandemic detection and control, the authors write, is the International Health Regulations treaty, which was signed in 2005 by 196 member-nations of the World Health Organization to work together for global health security.

The IHR imposed a deadline of 2012 for all states to have in place the necessary capacities to detect, report and respond to local infectious outbreaks. But only a few parties have reported meeting these requirements, and one-third has not even begun the process. There have also been efforts to enhance state reporting of health systems capacities through voluntary assessments of countries working through the Global Health Security Agenda consortium.

But both frameworks, Barry said in an interview, need financial and political support.

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“I see a stronger IHR with more than words — but actual money behind it in order for it to become stronger,” said Barry, noting the Global Health Security Agenda ends in 2018 and she has been asked to sit on a NAAS task force to form its next iteration. “I’m hoping we can move the needle to put money into bio-surveillance and health security, especially in conflict areas.”

Why should Americans care?

“Pathogens know no borders,” Barry said. “And with climate change, we have tremendous movement of vectors; with globalization and billions of people routinely in flight, we have tremendous health threats traveling first class and coach.”

Twenty Countries at High Risk

Meanwhile, some 20 countries are at high risk for pandemic emergence. The two Stanford professors are urgently calling for “new approaches that better integrate the technical and political challenges inherent in preventing pandemics in areas of civil war.”

Wise and Barry note that human factors, such as the expansion of populations into previously forested areas, domesticated animal production practices, food shortages, and alterations in water usage and flows, have been the primary drivers of altered ecological relationships.

So globalization with climate change brews the perfect storm.

“There is substantial evidence that climate change is reshaping ecological interactions and vector prevalence adjacent to human populations,” they said. “Enhanced trade and air transportation have increased the risk that an outbreak will spread widely. While infectious outbreaks can be due to all forms of infectious agents, including bacteria, parasites, and fungi — viruses are of the greatest pandemic concern.”

Science suggests the greatest danger of pandemic lies in tropical and subtropical regions where human and animals are most likely to interact. Most of the estimated 400 emerging infectious diseases that have been identified since 1940 have been zoonoses, or infections that have been transmitted from animals to humans. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), for example, is believed to have emerged from a simian host in Central Africa.

Recent analyses have suggested that the “hotspots” for emerging infectious diseases overlap substantially with areas plagued by civil conflict and political instability. 

The U.S. Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been working on the Emerging Pandemic Threats Program to improve local pandemic detection and response capacities by directing resources and training to countries thought to be at high risk for pandemic. However, it is not clear that this and related programs are addressing the political dynamics at the local level that will determine the essential cooperation of local communities with any imposed global health security response.

“The unpredictability of a serious infectious outbreak, the speed with which it can disseminate, and the fears of domestic political audience can together create a powerful destabilizing force,” Wise and Barry write in their conclusion. “Current discussions regarding global health governance reform have largely been preoccupied by the performance and intricate bureaucratic interaction of global health agencies. However, what may prove far more critical may be the ability of global health governance structures to recognize and engage the complex, political realities on the ground in areas plagued by civil war.”