Are They Ready?

Sreeram Yashasvi, reporting from the United Nations General Assembly Disarmament and International Security Council (UNGA-DISEC), tries to gauge the preparedness of different countries in the face of a bio-weapon emergency.

In a survey conducted in the 71st session of the UNGA-DISEC where the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was being analyzed, 30 countries, out of 47 countries present in the committee, said they were ready to handle a biological weapon emergency. Ten countries admitted to not being ready while seven countries abstained from answering. The puzzling trend is that the delegates of third world nations like the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Central African Republic thought they were ready to handle a biological weapon emergency while facts show an average Nigerian lives for 47 years. This life expectancy places them at 220 out of a total of 224 countries. Situations like this tend to create issues of credibility on future claims by many countries’ representatives in the forum.

(Edited by Drishya Sobhana Narayanan)