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New Disease Likely to Come Out of West, Central Africa
"Bird flu, West Nile virus and Hendra virus are all viral diseases that have jumped large evolutionary distances to infect humans," said lead researcher Jonathan Davies of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Avian influenza and West Nile virus have a natural reservoir in birds, while bats provide the host for Hendra virus.
"We suggest hotspots of future emerging diseases may be found where humans come into close proximity with wild primates, as is increasingly the case in the forests of Central and West Africa, due to rapidly growing human populations and scarcity of resources," said co-author Amy Pederson of the University of Sheffield, northern England.
"In addition, we are likely to see an increase in outbreaks of novel viral diseases as humans invade previously isolated habitats, and these may be just as likely to jump from a rat or a bat, as an ape."
Predicting host shifts could slash the risk, they said. Money could be invested in projects to prevent human-animal contact and in building early-warning networks to detect any disease outbreak.
In February, a paper published in the British journal Nature found that the emergence of new diseases had roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years.
Its authors named the biggest potential source for a new animal-borne disease, or zoonose, were East Asia, the Indian sub-continent, the Niger delta and Africa's Great Lakes region.
The 2002-3 outbreak of severe acute respirary syndrome (SARS), which originated in Chinese bats, cost 30 billion dollars although the death toll was fewer than 800, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures.
Source-AFP
RAS/L
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