Combating infectious disease epidemics through China’s Belt and Road Initiative

On March 17, 2017, the United Nations (UN) Security Council, backed by the consensus of its 193 member states, adopted Resolution 2344, which calls for strengthening regional economic cooperation through China's Belt and Road (also called Silk Road) Initiative (BRI) [1].Based on the cornerstones of peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, and mutual learning and sharing benefit, this initiative was proposed by the Chinese government and is participated in by various parties.Its goal is to provide fundamental solutions to boost global economic development through enhancing policy coordination, facility connection, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people bonds.The UN Secretary-General, Mr. Anto ´nio Guterres, acknowledged that the BRI tallies with, and complements, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in terms of promoting inclusive development, strengthening exchange between countries, and benefiting people within the initiative's scope [2].The BRI currently involves 69 countries (mainly those named in the initial Belt and Road outreach and those having signed cooperation agreements), 70% of the world population in total, 30% of the global gross domestic product, and 75% of the world's energy reserves [2][3][4].Although the BRI is primarily economic, it also includes important health dimensions.The Healthy China 2030 plan, promulgated in 2016, considers health as one of the national policy priorities, and the Memorandum of Understanding with the World Health Organization (WHO), signed in 2017, which promotes global health security and development along the terms of the initiative [5,6].Based on these agreements, the building of a Health Silk Road has become a core task leading to an extensive engagement in global health development [7,8].During the Belt and Road High-Level Meeting for Health Cooperation: Towards a Health Silk Road, held in August 2017 in Beijing, the Director-General of WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, positively commented on the initiative, saying that it may become the stimulus needed to drive our united activities towards universal health coverage (UHC) and that it contains the necessary fundamentals, such as infrastructure building, access to medicines, and human resources, needed to build a platform for sharing experience and promoting best practices [5].The Health Silk Road concept establishes the importance of promoting cooperation among the related countries in the prevention and control of communicable diseases, medical system and policies, healthcare capacity building, staff training and exchange, traditional medicine, and health education as well as disaster relief, aid, and poverty reduction for health [1].