The future of bathing?
From
Science Daily comes more
bad news about climate change.
In an article published online today in conjunction with a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Daniel Brooks warns that humans can expect more such illnesses to emerge in the future, as climate change shifts habitats and brings wildlife, crops, livestock, and humans into contact with pathogens to which they are susceptible but to which they have never been exposed before.
"It's not that there's going to be one 'Andromeda Strain' that will wipe everybody out on the planet," Brooks said, referring to the 1971 science fiction film about a deadly pathogen. "There are going to be a lot of localized outbreaks putting pressure on medical and veterinary health systems. It will be the death of a thousand cuts."
At least it won't be like that book.
That's good, I guess?
But for more than 100 years, scientists have assumed parasites don’t quickly jump from one species to another because of the way parasites and hosts co-evolve.
Brooks calls it the “parasite paradox.” Over time, hosts and pathogens become more tightly adapted to one another. According to previous theories, this should make emerging diseases rare, because they have to wait for the right random mutation to occur.
Alas, this new study points to the fact that parasites can jump and mutate and adapt much more rapidly than previously thought. The results can be much worse since animals (ourselves included) can contract pathogens that we have very little historical resistance to. What is there to do about this new development?
The answer, Brooks said, is for greater collaboration between the public and veterinary health communities and the “museum” community -- the biologists who study and classify life forms and how they evolve.
In addition to treating human cases of an emerging disease and developing a vaccine for it, he said, scientists can learn which non-human species carry the virus. Knowing the geographic distribution and the behavior of the non-human reservoirs of the virus could lead to public health strategies based on reducing risk of infection by minimizing human contact with infected animals, much like those that reduced the incidence of malaria and yellow fever by reducing human contact with mosquitos.
For further discussion go to FishOutofWater's diary
here.