Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It?
A horse dies mysteriously in Australia, and people around it fall sick.
A chimpanzee carcass in Central Africa passes Ebola to the villagers
who scavenge and eat it. A palm civet, served at a Wild Flavors
restaurant in southern China, infects one diner with a new ailment,
which spreads to Hong Kong, Toronto, Hanoi, and Singapore, eve
ntually
to be known as SARS. These cases and others, equally spooky, represent
not isolated events but a pattern, a trend: the emergence of new human
diseases from wildlife.
The experts call such diseases zoonoses,
meaning animal infections that spill into people. About 60 percent of
human infectious diseases are zoonoses.
For the most part,
they result from infection by one of six types of pathogen: viruses,
bacteria, fungi, protists, prions, and worms. The most troublesome are
viruses. They are abundant, adaptable, not subject to antibiotics, and
only sometimes deterred by antiviral drugs. Within the viral category is
one particularly worrisome subgroup, RNA viruses. AIDS is caused by a
zoonotic RNA virus.
So was the 1918 influenza, which killed 50
million people. Ebola is an RNA virus, which emerged in Uganda this
summer after four years of relative quiescence. Marburg, Lassa, West
Nile, Nipah, dengue, rabies, yellow fever virus, and the SARS bug are
too.
Read more at http://www.popsci.com/science/
Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It?
A horse dies mysteriously in Australia, and people around it fall sick. A chimpanzee carcass in Central Africa passes Ebola to the villagers who scavenge and eat it. A palm civet, served at a Wild Flavors restaurant in southern China, infects one diner with a new ailment, which spreads to Hong Kong, Toronto, Hanoi, and Singapore, eve
A horse dies mysteriously in Australia, and people around it fall sick. A chimpanzee carcass in Central Africa passes Ebola to the villagers who scavenge and eat it. A palm civet, served at a Wild Flavors restaurant in southern China, infects one diner with a new ailment, which spreads to Hong Kong, Toronto, Hanoi, and Singapore, eve
ntually
to be known as SARS. These cases and others, equally spooky, represent
not isolated events but a pattern, a trend: the emergence of new human
diseases from wildlife.
The experts call such diseases zoonoses, meaning animal infections that spill into people. About 60 percent of human infectious diseases are zoonoses.
For the most part, they result from infection by one of six types of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists, prions, and worms. The most troublesome are viruses. They are abundant, adaptable, not subject to antibiotics, and only sometimes deterred by antiviral drugs. Within the viral category is one particularly worrisome subgroup, RNA viruses. AIDS is caused by a zoonotic RNA virus.
So was the 1918 influenza, which killed 50 million people. Ebola is an RNA virus, which emerged in Uganda this summer after four years of relative quiescence. Marburg, Lassa, West Nile, Nipah, dengue, rabies, yellow fever virus, and the SARS bug are too.
Read more at http://www.popsci.com/science/
The experts call such diseases zoonoses, meaning animal infections that spill into people. About 60 percent of human infectious diseases are zoonoses.
For the most part, they result from infection by one of six types of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists, prions, and worms. The most troublesome are viruses. They are abundant, adaptable, not subject to antibiotics, and only sometimes deterred by antiviral drugs. Within the viral category is one particularly worrisome subgroup, RNA viruses. AIDS is caused by a zoonotic RNA virus.
So was the 1918 influenza, which killed 50 million people. Ebola is an RNA virus, which emerged in Uganda this summer after four years of relative quiescence. Marburg, Lassa, West Nile, Nipah, dengue, rabies, yellow fever virus, and the SARS bug are too.
Read more at http://www.popsci.com/science/
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