Word: humanism
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...pathogens emerging from wildlife. One way to start would be to trace how, when and where the H1N1 virus emerged from pigs into people (or vice versa - over the weekend, Canada confirmed reports that a swine worker in Alberta passed the H1N1 virus to pigs). The H1N1 virus contains human, avian and swine flu genes, and genetic analysis indicates that it reassorted years ago, meaning it could have been in pig populations for some time before the virus gained the ability to transmit easily from person to person. If we had had tight surveillance of flu infections among swine...
...imports live pigs from Europe, while Mexico takes in some 600,000 pigs a year from the U.S., so it's entirely possible that the virus began in Europe (the H1N1 virus has Eurasian genes), then moved to America and Mexico with pigs before infecting the first human. "It's going to take several weeks and maybe months to get a clearer picture," says Juan Lubroth, a senior officer at the FAO. "There's just a lot that we don't know." (Read "Swine Flu: Don't Blame...
...around the world, veterinary health care is the poor cousin to human health, chronically underfunded. But if we are serious about heading off new infections, we need to increase available resources and make sure that veterinarians are looking out for new diseases in livestock and wildlife in the same way that the WHO's global flu network is constantly monitoring the world's human population for new influenza strains. As we've seen with H1N1, once a new flu has emerged and begun spreading among people, it's likely too late to contain. "What we need to do is upstream...
TIME: Similarly, do we need to improve communication between the veterinary health and human public health sectors, to make sure that if vets see something unusual, they inform their counterparts in public health immediately and find those diseases faster...
Besser: If you look at where emerging infectious diseases come from, they tend to come from the interface of animal and human health. We have a facility here - the National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne and Enteric Diseases that's addressing those issues. Because, you're right, the better connection we can have between the two, the better our ability to pick up infectious diseases more quickly...