Featured Image
Why is it important?
This article offers an accessible look at the known facts about the origins of infectious diseases in our pwn and previous times. It serves as a timely warning against over-emphasizing any single source of a human disease or its transmission and to learn lessons from pandemics past, so that we are not once caught as we were with the onset of COVID-19 "as ill prepared to prevent the disruption to our lives and livelihoods as our forebears who faced pandemics with much higher mortality rates."
Perspectives
This article shows the synergistic value when researchers from two seemingly unrelated fields--at-the-bench virology and in-the-dusty-archive history of science and medicine combine forces to analyze a current crisis. It was prompted largely by the the scientist's view that people were altogether too ready to label a disease a zoonosis (i.e. being of animal original) and attempt to absolve themselves, and indeed human activity, of blame--and therefore responsibility--for COVID (in this case) rather than work toward find viable solutions to control its spread.
Dr Neeraja Sankaran
National Centre for Biological Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emergence of epidemic diseases: zoonoses and other origins, Faculty Reviews, January 2022, F1000Research,
DOI: 10.12703/r/11-2.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
