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.”

Global pollution kills 9m a year and threatens 'survival of human societies’

Pollution kills at least nine million people and costs trillions of dollars every year, according to the most comprehensive global analysis to date, which warns the crisis “threatens the continuing survival of human societies”.

A Bangladeshi rickshaw puller rides past smoke created
 by burning waste materials on a street in Dhaka.

Toxic air, water, soils and workplaces are responsible for the diseases that kill one in every six people around the world, the landmark report found, and the true total could be millions higher because the impact of many pollutants are poorly understood. The deaths attributed to pollution are triple those from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

The vast majority of the pollution deaths occur in poorer nations and in some, such as India, Chad and Madagascar, pollution causes a quarter of all deaths. The international researchers said this burden is a hugely expensive drag on developing economies.

Read Damian Carrington’s story on The Guardian - “Global pollution kills 9m a year and threatens 'survival of human societies’.”