The Origin and Prevention of Pandemics
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...50-12-1636.pdf
This is a 2010 journal article discussing the need for global surveillance of animal to human interactions for pandemic preventions. Currently, we do go around the world to different areas and sample animals to try to predict what bovine, avian, swine or x-strain could potentially cross over from animals to humans, and we attempt to apply prophylactics in the form of the seasonal flu vaccine or to kill animals to reduce the chance of transmission.
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As we increase our interactions with animals through hunting, the trading of animal foods, animal husbandry practices, wet markets, and the domestication of animals or exotic pets, the probability of cross-species transmission dramatically increases.
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Other factors are also thought to have the potential to influence zoonotic disease emergence. For instance, the loss of biodiversity is believed to be an important contributing factor to zoonosis, and studies conducted in the Congo Basin and Rift Valley suggest that deforestation and climate change play important roles in the risk of zoonotic transmission from wildlife to humans. Likewise, defor- estation and climate change are hypothesized to have been causal events that led to the 1998 emergence of Nipah virus from fruit bats to pig livestock and, subsequently, to the farm workers within the Kinta district of Perak state in Peninsular Malaysia, resulting in hundreds of reported cases of acute viral encephalitis
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One Root Cause of Pandemics Few People Think About: It’s our seemingly insatiable desire to eat meat
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...e-think-about/
This 2020 publication from Scientific American discusses the link between livestock and pandemics. Oddly enough, reducing meat consumption was not mentioned as a mitigating strategy in the previous journal article, but I believe it will become a greater talking point in the future.
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Indeed, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 appears to have originated in a pig confinement operation in North Carolina. And while the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 evidently originated in Chinese chicken farms (case fatality rate 60 percent), a similar bird flu in the U.S. just five years ago led American poultry farmers to kill tens of millions of their birds to contain the outbreak, which thankfully never made the jump into the human population. And at this very moment, both India and China have announced bird flu outbreaks among their chicken factories. Similarly, these are not yet affecting human health.
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