Nathan Wolfe, the subject of my recent Wired profile, has a new paper out in Nature this week — co-authored with Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel — outlining some of the ideas from the story in greater scientific depth. The abstract is here. Some further coverage at MSNBC here.
Wolfe and Diamond, along with Claire Dunavan at UCLA, lay out a five-step process by which viruses jump from animals to humans and then become established in human populations. They also comb the scientific literature for 25 significant viruses, from hepatitis B to influenza A, to AIDS, to smallpox, and parse out some interesting conclusions about how some deadly viruses become endemic in humans, and others don’t.
Their main conclusion, however, is that we know very little about the origins of diseases that have shaped human history. They propose an “origins initiative” to study the beginnings of a dozen of the deadliest agents. They also describe Wolfe’s effort, described in depth in the Wired piece, to expland his bushmeat hunter-monitoring project in Cameroon into a global early monitoring system for new viruses jumping from wild animals to humans:
Most major human infectious diseases have animal origins, and we continue to be bombarded by novel animal pathogens. Yet there is no ongoing systematic global effort to monitor for pathogens emerging from animals to humans. Such an effort could help us to describe the diversity of microbial agents to which our species is exposed; to characterize animal pathogens that might threaten us in the future; and perhaps to detect and control a local human emergence before it has a chance to spread globally.
Posted at 12:05 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Science, Wired |
