ISGP Podcast: If I Ran the Zoo

When it comes to animal-borne diseases, emerging and recurring varieties elicit wildly different levels of public concern (Spoiler alert: people in the developed world are generally more concerned about emerging diseases). This dramatically influences health outcomes, especially in less affluent regions.

A small fraction of the public’s attention is given to endemic zoonoses linked to poverty in developing countries. To make matters worse, rapid urbanization in these areas introduces additional factors that increase the risk of zoonoses, such as lack of sanitation and increased exposure to livestock. For example, due to the rapidly growing demand for meat to feed an even more rapidly growing population, farmers in some countries need to cross-breed wild cattle to increase meat or dairy production. And those wild cattle can house some pretty nasty germs, which cattle farmers haven’t been exposed to historically.

These issues are part of a policy position paper titled “One Health Plus: Integrated Control and Elimination of Zoonoses” from the ISGP’s conference on Emerging and Persistent Infectious Disease: Focus on Societal and Economic Context. The program was convened by the Institute on Science for Global Policy in partnership with George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2012. The paper was authored by Dr. Jakob Zinsstag, Deputy Head of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute and University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland.

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