Experts urge action to stop animal diseases infecting humans

doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7449.1158-b

BMJ 2004;328:1158 (15 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7449.1158-b

News extra

Experts urge action to stop animal diseases infecting humans

Geneva Fiona Fleck

Scientists have called on governments to take urgent action to prevent the emergence of new zoonotic diseases—ones that jump species from animals to humans—in the wake of recent fatal outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), believed to have been transmitted by civet cats, and avian flu from birds.

Experts told an international conference on zoonotic diseases hosted by the World Health Organization in Geneva on 3 to 5 May that over the past decade most emerging human diseases came originally from animals.

This trend would continue as humans came into more contact with wild animals and encroached on their habitats, they said.

Some zoonoses have triggered relatively few cases in humans but have wrought considerable economic damage and panic. For example, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the disease that produced a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, led to mass culls of cattle. A particularly lethal strain . . . [Full text of this article]

Add to CiteULike CiteULike Add to Complore Complore Add to Connotea Connotea Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us Add to Digg Digg Add to Reddit Reddit Add to Technorati Technorati What's this?

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

This Gap has Long been overdue for filling: Wayengera Andrew Misaki
bmj.com, 14 May 2004 [Full text]
Announcement: Errol S Prasad
bmj.com, 14 May 2004 [Full text]
Globalization and zoonotic disease spread!: Dr.Naseem Akhtar Qureshi, MD, IMAPA, LMIPS
bmj.com, 20 May 2004 [Full text]