|
|
Bird Flu is the "The Coming Plague"
|
Cases when a disease commonly affecting animals is transmitted to people are not something new or extraordinary. However, over the last years, such cases became more frequent, and animals started to transmit viruses, bacteria and parasites to humans more frequently than before.
Experts at the National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Disease in the USA believe that it’s just the beginning—in the nearest future new diseases can appear more often and cause even greater damage. Due to the development of the globalization phenomena and environmental degradation, close contacts between humans and different kinds of animals happen more often than before. In particular, many animals that had never lived alongside people were domesticated. Exotic animals, for example, from Asia, become an item on the menu for people who live, for example, in Europe. Modern structure of food production results in the fact that an epidemic originating among domestic animals, can threaten life and health of hundreds of thousands of people. The change of climate results in the change of areals of migrating birds and insects (in particular, mosquitoes) – they transfer agents of disease over considerable distances. The changes of people’s or animals’ habitat also change the mechanisms of activity for causative agent of various diseases.
Laurie Garrett, the author of the book “The Coming Plague,” says that the real scale of the problem is unknown—until the agent of a disease that usually affects animals spreads ona human, nobody can predict it. It is not known for certain when and why, but agents of diseases mutate and become dangerous for people. Infection can happen through an animal intermediate. It can be a mosquito (for instance, mosquitoes spread malaria, infecting people through a bite) or an animal eaten by a man. It is believed that people got the flu virus from waterfowl. Yet, the infection most likely happened when a man ate pork from a pig that caught the virus from a duck or a goose. However, there’s a chance that the animals also suffer from it and catch “human” diseases. No country in the world has special programs, focused on the defense of people from animal-originated diseases.
|
|
|
