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Researchers offer new insights into animal-to-human disease transmission
Key findings on who gets sick and why from the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium are being shared at One Health for the Real World: zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing, a high-level international symposium taking place at the Zoological Society of London this week.
Resilient global health systems, strong civil society and leadership for those health systems and broad research agendas from disparate fields are the three essentials to face the challenges of 21st century equity and health, according to Professor Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust.
Speaking at the One Health for the Real World: zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing symposium, co-organised by the STEPS-led Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium and the Zoological Society of London, with support from the Royal Society, Professor Farrar stressed that people were not passive observers in history and could bring about these changes.
New SARS-like virus is poised to infect humans
A SARS-like virus found in Chinese horseshoe bats may be poised to infect humans without the need for adaptation, overcoming an initial barrier that could potentially set the stage for an outbreak according to a study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The work, led by Ralph Baric, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, comes on the heels of two recent high-profile outbreaks – Ebola and Zika – for which there are no vaccines. The two outbreaks combined claimed thousands of lives and cost billions in foregone economic growth.
Kenya Zoonotic Diseases Priority Map
‘Here And Now’: Tracing The Wisconsin Elizabethkingia Outbreak
Elizabethkingia continues to challenge epidemiologists as itafflicts people scattered throughout southern and eastern Wisconsin. It’s a type of gram-negative bacteria found commonly in the environment, but only rarely causes disease in humans. When an Elizabethkingia infection does strike, it’s dangerous because it tends to affect people with weakened immune systems. Moreover, these bacteria are often resistant to antibiotics. Since November 2015, the species, Elizabethkingia anophelis, has caused blood infections in 48 people in Wisconsin, 15 of whom have died.
It is time to rethink the way we handle pets and wildlife
The results, published in the open journal, Plos One, revealed that for every 10 cases of animal illnesses or deaths that occurred, the probability of human sickness in the same household increased by about 31 per cent.
Prof Eric Fèvre, a professor of veterinary infectious diseases at the Institute of Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), wrote a blog post, “Zoonoses in Africa” on the websitemicrobiologysociety.org, in which he said that urbanisation is presenting opportunities for pathogens to find new hosts to survive.
The post, published on November 11, 2015 read: “The intensification of farming, for example, leads to closer relationships between individuals and animals, generating opportunities for more rapid mutations as organisms move from host to host, while also providing a structured way for those pathogens to enter highly ordered food chains that branch out and reach very large numbers of people”.
Other studies paint an increasingly disturbing pattern of diseases either emerging, or the incidence of existing ones increasing.
If we want medicine to be evidence-based, what should we think when the evidence doesn’t agree?
To understand if a new treatment for an illness is really better than older treatments, doctors and researchers look to the best available evidence. Health professionals want a “last word” in evidence to settle questions about what the best modes of treatment are.
But not all medical evidence is created equal. And there is a clear hierarchy of evidence: expert opinion and case reports about individual events are at the lowest tier, and well-conducted randomized controlled trials are near the top. At the very top of this hierarchy are meta-analyses – studies that combine the results from multiple studies that asked the same question. And the very, very top of this hierarchy are meta-analyses performed by a group called the Cochrane Collaboration.
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