Reminder from erala on Nipah
he death of a 12-year-old boy in Kerala has brought back focus on the threat from the Nipah virus. Like Sars-cov-2, it is zoonotic, ing jumped from animals. The virus is carried by t bats and infection spreads when a person eats rinks something contaminated by bat droppings. ah infections have a high fatality rate; 17 of the 19 firmed cases in Kerala in 2018 died. The World lth Organization estimates 40-75% of the ctions are likely to be fatal. Experts have warned high pandemic potential with a virus such as ah. Till now, cases of human-to-human transmin are few compared to infections via contact h animals or contaminated products. But a 2019 y in the raised possibility of the virus mutating to become more to jump from person to person, making any break a cause for significant concern. his is of relevance to India. Kerala, except for 0, has reported Nipah outbreaks. After being mingly caught off guard in 2018, the state put in e protocols to carry out widespread contact ing and testing efforts. The following year, when udent was found infected, 329 people who had e in contact were traced, potentially preventing re cases. No deaths took place that year. This r, the state has identified 250 people, and 11 wing symptoms are being tested. Covid-19 has onstrated that not all states have the resources he expertise to mount a robust test-trace-treat paign. If the virus spreads in a state with inferior veillance, it could escalate into an epidemic. ah, in the time of Covid-19, should serve as a
The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers, argued that attaining great power is a matter of balancing economic wealth and military power, and great powers inevitably decline because the military overreach necessary to sustain their power also requires the draining of economic resources to support it. Knowingly or not, Kennedy’s thesis is often the foundation for quick predictions of great power decline among policy pundits.
However, despite important insights, Kennedy’s argument also had problems. Military overreach is difficult to pinpoint. How many such instances of the overreach of power need to occur, how deep and prolonged do they need to be, and how devastating a loss of great powers need to incur, in order to decline is hard to say. Kennedy also did not account for domestic politics, alliances, technologies or ideologies in sustaining or eroding great power. For example, the erstwhile Soviet Union did not lose the Cold War because it lost the war in Afghanistan, but because it could not contain the processes of democratisation and nationalism within its borders, and that led to its disintegration.
Using, various yardsticks of the decline of great powers, including those outlined by Kennedy and others, can help us understand the case of the US. It is difficult to say, as some have, that the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos that has followed was because of military overreach, similar to the American