As Gazeta.Ru notes, the list of dangerous places on the planet includes the United States and Japan alongside Africa and Southeast Asia.
If one believes the bleak forecasts of infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists, the world should literally freeze in anticipation of a new unknown threat. And while previously most work boiled down to, if not intimidation, then calculation of potential losses and doomsday predictions, a new study by British and American scientists predicts where exactly and from whom danger should be expected. They traced the development stages of more than 335 infectious diseases from 1940 to 2004, assessing the role and contribution of various risk factors in the emergence, spread, and progression of the disease. The scientists' work was published in the latest issue of Nature.
According to the research group, outbreaks of such 'well-known' infections as antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, chloroquine-resistant malaria, and HIV are the result of a significant increase in population density, expansion of international trade, travel, and changes in agricultural practices. These shifts in the daily life of the vast majority of people since the 1940s have become key causes of the catastrophic increase in the number of new infections.
The 1980s particularly stood out. About 100 new infections emerged in ten years. HIV played a significant role in this. Like 60% of the infections considered, the immunodeficiency virus is a zoonosis – that is, transmitted from animals to humans. According to the latest data, 72% of all zoonoses come from wildlife, and the remaining 28% are a gift from domestic animals. Among the latter are the Nipah virus in Malaysia and the much more well-known SARS of Chinese origin, which caused an almost complete halt in tourist travel to Southeast Asia.
The authors agree with the position of most epidemiologists that the most important thing is to stop the spread of the disease at an early stage, even when there is no specific treatment method. As the case of the notorious SARS showed, the logic is simple and singular: the earlier the infection is caught, the less harm it can do. Isolation and simple methods of personal protection such as masks and travel restrictions play a much greater role in preventing the spread of various infectious diseases, especially on a global scale.
As the authors themselves emphasized, this approach to preventing the spread of new types of infections is fundamentally different from controlling and researching existing diseases, although the strategy they propose is very similar to the traditional one – the British call for more thorough monitoring of the 'hot infectious spots' of our planet.
Kate Jones, one of the authors of the study, a senior research fellow at the London Institute of Zoology, urges modern experts in viral and infectious diseases to think on a much larger scale, because it will be much more difficult to hide from new diseases in the modern world than before, and a danger that arises in a small region can threaten the entire world population.
By the way, SARS is an indicator of the possible error in the initial data of this work. Quite recently, microbiologists showed that humanity received the atypical pneumonia virus from bats, not from predators. However, such a correction still does not affect the conclusions made by Jones's team, since the source is still wild animals, and the epicenter of the epidemic on the world map has not shifted.
But the most important thing is that the emergence of new, unknown infections is not significantly different from the transformation of existing ones into antibiotic-resistant forms. Therefore, based on 64 years of history, the list of 'hot spots', along with the already 'established' equatorial Africa and Southeast Asia, can include, at first glance, prosperous Australia, Europe, and North America.
But the greatest threat comes from developing countries in eastern Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Jones and her colleagues suggest that a new threat should be expected from there. Currently, this region experiences particularly intense population migrations and mixing of various ethnic groups, and contact with diverse and often wild animals remains part of normal life. In addition, the situation with the development of medicine remains difficult here, particularly in terms of the availability of medicines and especially antibiotics of various generations, as well as modern antiviral drugs.
The scientists emphasize that a more precise localization of the 'hot spots' on the map requires much more computation, for which the study authors plan to compare their data with climate and demographic models in the near future. Thus, they draw attention to global environmental change, which is already causing new directions of animal migration, and consequently, their prokaryotic and non-cellular companions.
Pyotr SMIRNOV.
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