Peer-reviewed veterinary case report
Conservation medicine and a new agenda for emerging diseases.
- Journal:
- Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
- Year:
- 2004
- Authors:
- Daszak, Peter et al.
- Affiliation:
- Consortium for Conservation Medicine · United States
- Species:
- bird
Plain-English summary
In recent years, there have been many outbreaks of new viruses and other germs, often coming from wildlife, which pose serious risks to both animal and human health. For example, viruses like Nipah and Hendra have caused outbreaks in Malaysia and Australia, while the West Nile virus appeared in North America in 1999. Additionally, a disease affecting frogs and other amphibians has led to significant declines in their populations worldwide. To tackle these issues, experts are now using a conservation medicine approach, which combines knowledge from veterinary science, medicine, ecology, and other fields to understand and predict how these diseases emerge. The aim is to develop strategies that can help prevent future outbreaks of both known and unknown pathogens.
Abstract
The last three decades have seen an alarming number of high-profile outbreaks of new viruses and other pathogens, many of them emerging from wildlife. Recent outbreaks of SARS, avian influenza, and others highlight emerging zoonotic diseases as one of the key threats to global health. Similar emerging diseases have been reported in wildlife populations, resulting in mass mortalities, population declines, and even extinctions. In this paper, we highlight three examples of emerging pathogens: Nipah and Hendra virus, which emerged in Malaysia and Australia in the 1990s respectively, with recent outbreaks caused by similar viruses in India in 2000 and Bangladesh in 2004; West Nile virus, which emerged in the New World in 1999; and amphibian chytridiomycosis, which has emerged globally as a threat to amphibian populations and a major cause of amphibian population declines. We discuss a new, conservation medicine approach to emerging diseases that integrates veterinary, medical, ecologic, and other sciences in interdisciplinary teams. These teams investigate the causes of emergence, analyze the underlying drivers, and attempt to define common rules governing emergence for human, wildlife, and plant EIDs. The ultimate goal is a risk analysis that allows us to predict future emergence of known and unknown pathogens.
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Search related cases →Original publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15604464/