Pathfinder
Editor, Senior Moderator
General News of Monday, 3 October 2011
West Africans at risk from bat epidemics
Excerpt:
Ecologists hope to avert public-health disaster without a cull. Serious viruses carried by bats pose a considerable risk to people in West Africa, warn epidemiologists cataloguing bat?human interactions in the region...
Andrew Cunningham, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Institute of Zoology in London, and his colleagues fear that the next big epidemic could come from henipaviruses, which can cause fatal encephalitis or respiratory disease in humans. There is no vaccination to protect against Hendra virus or Nipah virus, the two established species of henipavirus.
...
Cunningham says it's too early to say for sure how many people are infected with the viruses in Ghana. "We are getting some interesting results, however these have not yet been fully validated," he says. But the team has found evidence of a 'henipa-like' virus in domestic pigs from two villages about 70 kilometres north of Accra...
"It looks like there is spill-over from bats to pigs in Ghana," says Cunningham. "This is the first step along the line to a public-health threat."
Wood agrees. "I would be surprised if there was no spill-over to humans," he says.
Full text:
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=220557
West Africans at risk from bat epidemics
Excerpt:
Ecologists hope to avert public-health disaster without a cull. Serious viruses carried by bats pose a considerable risk to people in West Africa, warn epidemiologists cataloguing bat?human interactions in the region...
Andrew Cunningham, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Institute of Zoology in London, and his colleagues fear that the next big epidemic could come from henipaviruses, which can cause fatal encephalitis or respiratory disease in humans. There is no vaccination to protect against Hendra virus or Nipah virus, the two established species of henipavirus.
...
Cunningham says it's too early to say for sure how many people are infected with the viruses in Ghana. "We are getting some interesting results, however these have not yet been fully validated," he says. But the team has found evidence of a 'henipa-like' virus in domestic pigs from two villages about 70 kilometres north of Accra...
"It looks like there is spill-over from bats to pigs in Ghana," says Cunningham. "This is the first step along the line to a public-health threat."
Wood agrees. "I would be surprised if there was no spill-over to humans," he says.
Full text:
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=220557