Nathan Wolfe is a virus hunter who explains that we’ve known for a long time that the new, dangerous viruses are coming from animals to humans. The problem, as in other areas related to health, is that we only really target the problem once it has passed into the human population when it’s often too late to do much other than try to contain or slow down a virus. Because of our interconnectedness, slowing down a virus is a tall order.
All humans on the planet are now connected to each other spatially and temporally in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of vertebrate biology. Humans — as well as our domestic animals and wild animals we trade — move around the planet at biological warp speed. This provides new opportunities for viruses that would have gone extinct locally to have the population density fuel they need to establish themselves and spread globally.
We’ve created a “perfect storm” for viruses. And we’ll continue to see — as we have in the past few years — a whole range of new animal diseases as outbreaks in human populations. But we have to stop being surprised by them.
Here’s a look at Wolfe’s recent Ted Talk: A jungle search for the next pandemic virus.
Also worth a look is Steven Johnson’s Ted Talk on the spreading of epidemics posted over at Boing Boing.
