pandemic tracking contagions from cholera to ebola and beyond

We can do a lot to do active surveillance, to actually look for microbes that might be turning into human pathogens, and try to contain them before they start to cause epidemics. There’s a lot we can do to protect wildlife habitat, for example, so that the microbes in animals’ bodies stay in their bodies and don’t cross over into our bodies. But pandemics are something that we can do a lot to prevent. We’re not going to get rid of all of the microbes, nor would we ever want to. We live on a microbial planet, so that’s part of the human condition. SONIA SHAH: I mean, infectious disease is always going to exist. And that’s how we turn animal microbes into these epidemic- and pandemic-causing pathogens.ĪMY GOODMAN: So, how should this be dealt with? How should people understand the coronavirus? Diseases always exist, but how are epidemics and pandemics preventable? And the microbes that live in their bodies, which don’t cause them any kind of disease, can spill over into human bodies. And that allows people and bats to come into new kinds of contact. They come and roost in your back gardens and your farms and your yards instead. We can see with, for example, deforestation, that when you cut down the trees where bats roost, for example, they don’t just go away. And so that’s going to contribute to this broader phenomenon of people and wildlife coming into new kinds of contact. SONIA SHAH: Well, we know, in a general sense, that the climate crisis is resulting in tens of thousands of wild species moving into new places.

6) Time and again, medical progress has been held back by strict beliefs.AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this connection between climate crisis and the coronavirus. 5) Political deceit can enable pandemics. 3) Despite advancements in human waste management, feces can still lead to dangerous outbreaks.

2) Pathogens use our own transportation system to spread around. TED TALK: Sonia Shah: “Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond” | Talks at GoogleįROM HISTORY How the founding of a bank contributed to a devastating cholera epidemic A virus that spread to five continents in the course of a single day KEY POINTS 1) As humans spread across the globe, previously harmless animal pathogens adapted to our bodies and made us sick.

So what can we do? Well, to protect our own society and help others, we need to understand how outbreaks emerge and how they grow to catastrophic proportions. Thanks to modern medicine and good hygiene, a pandemic like that could never devastate the modern world! Or could it? Many epidemiologists believe that a global pandemic is going to hit in the near future. At school, we all learned, with a shudder, how the Black Death ravaged Europe.

Pandemic tracking contagions from cholera to ebola and beyond