June 28, 2005

Animal diseases need global solutions
 

THE threat of potential pandemics such as Ebola, SARS and bird flu demands a more holistic approach to disease control-one that prevents diseases from crossing the divide between humans, livestock and wildlife.

According to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), what is required is a "One World, One Health" concept that calls for the integration of efforts to deal proactively with disease threats to human and animal health before they reach crisis levels. The concept was created in response to the increased vulnerability of humanity and animals to a host of diseases, which are capable of adapting to other species and moving across the globe through the rapid transportation of goods and people.

Many of these diseases can move back and forth between species, mutating into more virulent, resistant forms. More than 60 percent of the 1,415 infectious diseases currently known to modern medicine are capable of infecting both humans and animals. Most of these diseases originated in animals and now infect people.

On the local level, the communities that rely on wildlife for their protein are vulnerable to pathogens from the forest. The AIDS virus may have entered human communities through the consumption of non-human primates with a similar virus that mutated. People in the Amazon basin consume between 67 million and 164 million kilograms of wild meat and 6.4 million to 15.8 million individual mammals in a year.

On the global level, one of the biggest challenges to health organizations and agencies is the worldwide trade in wildlife. Avian influenza-currently feared as one of the most likely candidates for a pandemic-was detected in two mountain eagles that were smuggled into Belgium from Thailand in carry-on baggage.

Livestock movement can introduce diseases also. Tuberculosis-a disease afflicting humans and domesticated cattle-has now spread across continents, infecting wild bison in Canada, deer in Michigan and Cape buffaloes in South Africa.

The costs of reacting to these problems are staggering. The rash of livestock pathogens that have spread around the world in the last decade-which include BSE, FMD, bird flu, and swine fever-has caused some US$100 billion in losses.

To address these problems, human and animal disease prevention efforts need to be integrated and coordinated. Recommendations include better surveillance of diseases to prevent outbreaks before they occur, encouraging governments to improve animal trade regulation, and breaking down barriers among health disciplines.