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(The Nation’s Health) NCEZID’s Bell: Infectious diseases remain major threat to human health
Q: NCEZID covers emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases. What do we mean when we talk about emerging diseases?
A: Microbes are very smart entities. They’ve been around for thousands and thousands of years, and one of the fundamental things about microbes is that they’re constantly changing. Because microbes are constantly changing, it means that the impact on people and their capacity to infect people is also always changing.
When we talk about emerging diseases, we’re talking about new diseases that might have already existed, for example, in animals, or in bats, and suddenly emerge as a cause of disease in people. An example of that recently is MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome.
Now, you also want to think about emerging diseases as diseases where suddenly the characteristics of the disease might change, or the geographic distribution of a disease might change. So a disease might emerge in one area where we had never seen it before.
Read this Q&A in full at The Nation’s Health.