The Economics of Infectious Disease, Trade and Pandemic Risk

Excerpt

The emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases has long been recognized as an incidental effect of our species’ activities on the planet—especially production and trade. The emergence of zoonoses results from activities that bring susceptible people into contact with livestock and wild animals infected with novel pathogens—whether bacteria, parasites, fungi, viruses or prions. Spread results from activities that move infected individuals, or that alter the range of wild reservoirs or vectors. Neither process is new. Diseases such as plague, yellow fever, influenza, anthrax and tuberculosis all originally emerged through contact with infected wild reservoirs. The spread of smallpox, typhus, and measles from Europe to the USA in the century after Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic was an incidental effect of voyages of exploration and exploitation. …