Britain is hotspot of new germs says new study
Novel infectious diseases such as HIV, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) and Ebola are emerging more often to cause epidemics, according to a study that concludes that Britain has become a global hotspot of new germs.
A breakthrough has been made in the understanding of what causes diseases like Aids to emerge, and how to predict which place will mark the birth of the next pandemic, which are now shown to have increased in number over the past half century.
The world is squandering its resources to fight emerging diseases, which are too focused on rich, northern hemisphere countries, according to the new analysis.
However, the study reveals that Britain is a hotspot of new diseases, both from animals such as mad cow disease and in terms of the emergence of drug resistant superbug strains, from E coli to MRSA, reflecting the nation's high population density, industrial farming methods and the widespread use of antibiotics.
Countries like Britain are putting themselves at risk of food borne disease - such as E coli in beef - by centralised factory farming methods, Increasing reliance on modern antibiotics has also helped breed such dangerous strains, for instance in British hospitals, said Dr Peter Daszak, a British emerging-diseases biologist at the Wildlife Trust, New York, who directed the study published today in Nature.
Some strains, such as lethal variants of the common bacteria E coli and salmonella now spread widely with great speed because products like raw vegetables and cattle come from across the UK are processed in huge, centralised facilities. "Disease can be a cost of development," he says. "The message is good in a way. We are able to better target that problem now because we know Britain is one of the hotspots."
There have been many examples of how emerging infectious diseases pose a major threat to health: The HIV/Aids pandemic, thought to have started from human contact with chimps, has led to over 65 million infections, and triggered a spike of new diseases that invaded affected people; recent outbreaks of Sars originating in Chinese bats have cost up to $100 billion. Outbreaks like the exotic African Ebola virus have been small, but deadly.
By identifying emerging disease 'hotspots', the thinking goes, it should be possible to spot health risks at an early stage and prepare strategies to contain them. "We need to start finding pathogens before they emerge," says Dr Daszak. Now it is possible to anticipate them and be "ahead of the game."
