Anticipating the Next Pandemic

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/op...oc.semityn.www

Opinion
Anticipating the Next Pandemic
By DAVID QUAMMEN
Published: September 22, 2012

Snip:

...whenever an outbreak occurs, we all ask ourselves whether it might herald the Next Big One.

What I mean by the Next Big One is a pandemic of some newly emerging or re-emerging infectious disease, a global health catastrophe in which millions die...

...there probably will be a Next Big One, they say. It will most likely be caused by a virus, not by a bacterium or some other kind of bug. More specifically, we should expect an RNA virus (specifically, one that bears its genome as a single molecular strand), as distinct from a DNA virus (carrying its info on the reliable double helix, less prone to mutation, therefore less variable and adaptable). Finally, this RNA virus will almost certainly be zoonotic ? a pathogen that emerges from some nonhuman animal to infect, and spread among, human beings...

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Re: Anticipating the Next Pandemic

Source: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/col...-america.shtml

(Click above for interview)

What will be the next pandemic to hit North America?

Posted at 10:19 AM on September 24, 2012 by Stephanie Curtis

Tom Weber is interviewing David Quammen this morning about his new book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

What will that next pandemic be? It'll probably come from an animal. A pig. Possibly a rodent. Maybe even a seal...

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Re: Anticipating the Next Pandemic

not a bird ??

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Re: Anticipating the Next Pandemic

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When

By DAVID QUAMMEN
Published: May 9, 2013 Comment

BOZEMAN, Mont.
Op-Ed Contributor: The Next Contagion: Closer Than You Think (May 10, 2013)

TERRIBLE new forms of infectious disease make headlines, but not at the start. Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places ? reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China and Saudi Arabia.

You may have seen the news about H7N9, a new strain of avian flu claiming victims in Shanghai and other Chinese locales. Influenzas always draw notice, and always deserve it, because of their great potential to catch hold, spread fast, circle the world and kill lots of people. But even if you?ve been tracking that bird-flu story, you may not have noticed the little items about a ?novel coronavirus? on the Arabian Peninsula.

This came into view last September, when the Saudi Ministry of Health announced that such a virus ? new to science and medicine ? had been detected in three patients, two of whom had already died. By the end of the year, a total of nine cases had been confirmed, with five fatalities. As of Thursday, there have been 18 deaths, 33 cases total, including one patient now hospitalized in France after a trip to the United Arab Emirates. Those numbers are tiny by the standards of global pandemics, but here?s one that?s huge: the case fatality rate is 55 percent. The thing seems to be almost as lethal as Ebola.
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One authority at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an expert on nasty viruses, told me that the SARS outbreak was the scariest such episode he?d ever seen. That cautionary experience is one reason this novel coronavirus in the Middle East has attracted such concern.

Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is continually being inaccurately copied ? and when two virus strains infect a single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives them what one expert has called an ?intrinsic evolvability,? a capacity to adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts.
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What can we do? The first obligation is informed awareness....
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David Quammen, a contributing writer for National Geographic, is the author, most recently, of ?Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/opinion/the-next-pandemic-is-closer-than-you-think.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0