The dynamics of contemporary globalization compress time and space, creating a more immediately available world of goods, services, communications and interactions of all kinds (including military) (15) . Massive amounts of capital are aggregated at the global level, circulating in currency flows that dwarf anything previously known. These capital concentrations provide immense power to private capital to transform societies, often at the expense of a relative reduction in the power and authority of national governments, who in comparative terms lose the capacity to control their own policy agendas (14) . Economic interdependence brings unparalleled efficiencies in goods and information exchanges, but at the price of a hyper-sensitivity to negative economic effects within the system, as the 1997 Asian currency crisis revealed. Sudden disease outbreaks such as SARS can also have large and immediate negative economic effects that rapidly ripple throughout the system. The actual collapse of national economies from global financial instability such as that of Indonesia in 1997-98 can drastically reduce national income, with society-wide negative health consequences 4 .