| | 0r How I stopped worrying about disease and kept my kitty...
Good article on Pop Sci about the next "epidemic" disease.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-08/out-wild?single-page-view=true
of course, it may just pop up in places less exotic than central Africa: maybe from the mice in your newly rented apartment in New Mexico (as did Hanta virus).
or maybe Bubonic plague (also seen in the SWest desert). Tony Hillerman has a book where the subplot is prarie dogs with bubonic plague.
Here in the Philippines, we had an outbreak of Reston Ebola in local pigs. Luckily two pig helpers apparently got it but didn't get very sick (but the docs found antibodies against the virus). So where did it come from ? From monkeys sent here from africa and stored/bred locally to sell to the US and Europe for pets or for experiments.
Then there is bird flu: Jakarta had to outlaw backyard chickens because of the danger. It is spread by migrating birds, who visit and eat the food put out for those free range backyard fighting cocks or chickens. Voila, migrating bird to chicken to your table.
(Fighting cocks are kept under a small roof tied on a leash, in a lot of local back yards...they are pretty aggressive so you don't let them lose).
But there is also a human factor; HIV may have spread to humans via "bush meat" (eating monkeys) but if the public health department in San Francisco had shut down the bath houses when they noted epidemics of Hepatitis B and syphillis, as had been done in the past, there would have been a lot less HIV in the gay population.
Like SARS, which was from an animal but spread human to human, old fashioned methods of containing and preventing virual spread still work. Essentially SARS was stopped, not by newfangled medicines, but by quarantine and public health surveillience to find suspected contacts.
|
| | Posted 10/25/2012 11:01 AM - 212 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
Give eProps or Post a Comment |
