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A danger that’s real and close to home
Between 2000 and 2005, fifty million people have been infected and 78,000 died. And the guilty party? Animal-acquired infections known as zoonoses. According to a Dutch study, these illnesses transmitted by animals represent a serious threat to humanity.
Dengue fever, avian ’flu, rabies, SARS, etc. Viruses which “pass” from animals to man are becoming increasingly resilient. That, at least, is the opinion of Dr Jonathan Heeney of the Virology Department of the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands.
“It’s very worrying, given that we don’t have vaccines available at present against the most common and most deadly of these zoonoses”, he writes in the most recent edition of the Journal of Internal Medicine. And with good reason. It’s specific to the nature of these diseases that they are “elusive”. The virus is constantly mutating. And it is when it eventually adapts to inter-human transmission that it becomes a serial killer”. But it is only then that it is possible for a vaccine to be perfected.
Which is already too late! The virus is already in circulation… As Dr Heeney sees it, prevention is the best way of containing the threat of animal-acquired disease. “It’s imperative that doctors and vets work together to win this fight … upstream”.
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