The changing disease climate

Virus and bacterial diseases don’t appear out of nowhere, and most require a host to stay active, reproduce and evolve. Insects and other animals play a key role in this - around 60 percent of infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic – which means they’re spread from animals to humans.

Australia has never experienced a large outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

But this is a pattern also true of 75 percent of new or emerging infectious diseases.

Tracking disease prevalence, spread and movement among populations of animals is the role of veterinary epidemiologists like Dr Simon Firestone, Professor Mark Stevenson and Dr Anke Wiethoelter at the University of Melbourne.

“A nice analogy would be that a traditional veterinarian’s client is a single animal; a veterinary epidemiologist’s client is the country and all the farms and animals in that ecosystem,” Professor Stevenson says.

Read University of Melbourne Pursuit story - “The changing disease climate.”