Poverty turns pandemics, nuclear and bioterror AND causes organized crime and defo.

Poor states can be high-risk zones that in a rapidly globalizing world may eventually, often indirectly, pose significant risks to far-away countries. How? People, goods, funds and information now traverse the planet with lightning speed. More than two million travelers cross an international border each day. Between 1950 and 2003, air traffic volume grew from twenty-eight billion passenger-kilometers flown to 2.99 trillion passengerkilometers.5 Over the past four decades, total seaborne trade is estimated to have more than quadrupled.6 These factors combine to increase Americans’ exposure to distant phenomena – transnational security threats that can arise from and spread to anywhere on the planet. These threats could take various forms: a mutated avian flu virus that jumps from poultry to humans in Cambodia or Burkina Faso; a U.S. expatriate who unwittingly contracts Marburg virus in Angola and returns to Houston on an oil company charter; a terrorist cell that attacks a U.S. navy vessel in Yemen or Somalia; the theft of biological or nuclear materials from poorly secured facilities in the former Soviet Union; narcotics traffickers in Tajikistan and criminal syndicates from Nigeria; or, over the longer term, flooding and other effects of global warming exacerbated by extensive deforestation in the Amazon and Congo River basins. Weak states such as these can function passively as potential incubators or conveyor belts for transnational threats. Dangerous spillovers from weak states could result in major damage to the U.S. economy. In a worst case scenario, such as a deadly pandemic, they could result in the loss of hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of American lives.