COLUMBUS, Ohio – An Ohio State researcher predicts the world is on pace to experience at least one outbreak of a deadly disease like Ebola every year because of the high number of diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans.
About three-fourths of emerging infectious diseases, such Ebola and the H1N1 flu, are known as “zoonotic infections,” OSU veterinary preventive medicine professor Wondwossen Gebreyes writes in an article he co-authored and which was published in the Nov. 13 issue of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Gebreyes is the lead author of the article, which attempts to make the case for accelerating efforts to put a program called One Health into action. One Health refers to a strategy to understand and confront links between animal health, human health and the environment.
The paper emphasizes the danger of zoonotic infections and the damage they do, especially in developing nations that lack a variety of resources. The diseases can harm a nation’s economy and stop development in its tracks by killing livestock, reducing the ranks of qualified health professionals and teachers and creating political unrest, Gebreyes write.
The attention that has been paid to the Ebola outbreak that has killed thousands in Africa and infected a handful of people in the U.S. may serve to alert the public about the need to halt the spread of infectious diseases, especially in developing and densely populated areas of the world, Gebreyes said.
“What often seems like an abstract notion becomes very concrete when a deadly virus previously contained in Western Africa infects people on American soil,” he said.
Gebreyes calls the Ebola epidemic and the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic as “stark reminders of the unpredictable nature of pathogens and the importance of animals in the ecology and emergence of viral strains.”
Evidence suggests that bats were the original carriers of the strains of Ebola that sicken humans, and pigs were the source of the 2009 flu.