International Tourism and its Global Public Health Consequences [Summary]

National, regional, and local tourism bodies need to encourage research by task forces and individuals that will develop more coordinated contingency programs and bolster public health readiness. The travel industry is not a monolithic sector, nor are the nations involved uniformly eager to add more regulatory authority to international bodies or even local public healthpowers. But it has done so before, particularly in combating smallpox and polio. Today, the health and safety challenges of globalization in general and international tourism in particular pose far greater demands for a level of coordination, political will, surveillance, and planning than ever before. Inaction, denial, and complacency will only make the policy choices later less palatable and more costly in human and economic terms. "This article summary is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY)