Pathfinder
Editor, Senior Moderator
Public health watches foreign outbreaks because diseases move
By Helen Branswell, The Canadian Press January 14, 2014
TORONTO - A Toronto grandmother came home from Hong Kong with SARS. A Colorado woman visited a Ugandan cave and brought back to the United States an alarming souvenir ? Marburg fever, a cousin of Ebola. And now H5N1 bird flu has jumped the Pacific in the body of an Alberta woman.
If you ever wonder why public health officials worry about far-flung diseases ? the latest bird flu, the new MERS coronavirus ? the incidents above pretty much explain it.
Bugs travel. Or as public health folks like to put it, infectious diseases know no borders.
...
Even before the dawn of air travel, the pattern of people taking diseases along with them on their travels was well established. In the 1300s, an outbreak of the plague ? the Black Death ? moved from likely the current Mongolia along trade routes to Turkey and into Europe, says Morens.
It is estimated the disease wiped out 60 per cent of the population of Europe at the time.
...
The modern expansion of airline travel has increased the potential for disease spread. As more and more people travel more frequently, the territory that could accurately be described as "remote" is shrinking, Cetron suggests.
"We're much more closely connected than the distance on a map would argue," he says.
"There are very few places in the world where the dots cannot be connected within 72 hours. And that is getting pretty short. That is inside the incubation period of most diseases.... So the speed with which people move and the degree to which the globe is connected, even from remote, rural locations to the nearest urban airport to the next big hub is striking."
... Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organization's assistant director-general for health security and environment, says watching for this type of movement is critical.
"From the public health perspective, what we're always looking for with these kinds of viruses is evidence that whenever somebody gets sick that maybe we're seeing the tip of the iceberg, that they're the first case that we're picking up and maybe the signal that we're going to see a lot of other people be sick because the virus has gained the ability to go from person-to-person," he says.
"We treat each new infection in the same way. We're always a little bit concerned: Is this the first sign of a change in these viruses' ability to infect a lot of people?"
...
Full text:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/trav...+watches+foreign+outbreaks/9384962/story.html
By Helen Branswell, The Canadian Press January 14, 2014
TORONTO - A Toronto grandmother came home from Hong Kong with SARS. A Colorado woman visited a Ugandan cave and brought back to the United States an alarming souvenir ? Marburg fever, a cousin of Ebola. And now H5N1 bird flu has jumped the Pacific in the body of an Alberta woman.
If you ever wonder why public health officials worry about far-flung diseases ? the latest bird flu, the new MERS coronavirus ? the incidents above pretty much explain it.
Bugs travel. Or as public health folks like to put it, infectious diseases know no borders.
...
Even before the dawn of air travel, the pattern of people taking diseases along with them on their travels was well established. In the 1300s, an outbreak of the plague ? the Black Death ? moved from likely the current Mongolia along trade routes to Turkey and into Europe, says Morens.
It is estimated the disease wiped out 60 per cent of the population of Europe at the time.
...
The modern expansion of airline travel has increased the potential for disease spread. As more and more people travel more frequently, the territory that could accurately be described as "remote" is shrinking, Cetron suggests.
"We're much more closely connected than the distance on a map would argue," he says.
"There are very few places in the world where the dots cannot be connected within 72 hours. And that is getting pretty short. That is inside the incubation period of most diseases.... So the speed with which people move and the degree to which the globe is connected, even from remote, rural locations to the nearest urban airport to the next big hub is striking."
... Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organization's assistant director-general for health security and environment, says watching for this type of movement is critical.
"From the public health perspective, what we're always looking for with these kinds of viruses is evidence that whenever somebody gets sick that maybe we're seeing the tip of the iceberg, that they're the first case that we're picking up and maybe the signal that we're going to see a lot of other people be sick because the virus has gained the ability to go from person-to-person," he says.
"We treat each new infection in the same way. We're always a little bit concerned: Is this the first sign of a change in these viruses' ability to infect a lot of people?"
...
Full text:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/trav...+watches+foreign+outbreaks/9384962/story.html