Originally Posted by
velosnow
Of course it has been going on for a long time, but recent pushes deeper into the jungles & forests are accelerating it. An article from 2017...
"The world is now in uncharted territorywhen it comes to infectious diseases. We're facing a whole new era. Over the past century, the number of new infectious diseases cropping up each year has nearly quadrupled. The number of outbreaks per year has more than tripled."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsan...re-on-the-rise
I love me some bacon, among many other tasty meats but recognize the impact it has. Point is, our lifestyles the world over are creating issues we either didn't foresee or frankly just don't care enough to do anything about. One day that could all very seriously bite us much harder than previous outbreaks combined.
New world order
The world is now in uncharted territorywhen it comes to infectious diseases. We're facing a whole new era. Over the past century, the number of new infectious diseases cropping up each year has nearly
quadrupled. The number of outbreaks per year has more than
tripled.
In the U.S., we have seen more than a dozen new human diseases appear over the past 25 years. For instance, a killer tick-borne virus showed up in Kansas in 2014. A new type of leprosy dismembered a man in Arizona in 2002. And a new hemorrhagic fever jumped from rodents into people, killing three women in California in 1999 — to name just a few
With all due deference to goats and soda- nonsense.
This has ALWAYS been happening and most of those are self limiting. We just have a whole lot more Microbiology grad students out there looking. Most of these aren’t knew, and they are generally self-limiting from a epidemic standpoint. Camp Bullis near San Antonio Tx had a rickettsial infection back in WWII, with several hundred young healthy recruits seriously sickened and a handful killed. The etiology agent was identified and named,
R. Bullisiae..it has never been seen since.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15605930/
Then there’s Legionairres Disease, and Hantavirus, and many others. For that matter, Yosemite Park will occasionally get human cases of plague from the Golden Mantled Ground Squirrels (the State rodent, basically a rat in a fur coat) that inhabits the place.
https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/plague.htm
But much of the Southwest has had enzootic plague for a couple hundred years now. These diseases have always been there and there have been frequent non-sustained crossover infections, although humans are generally a dead end host for all of these. (Think swimmer’s itch, which is actually an avian version of schizosomiasis). We just haven’t had this many microbiology grad students before.
That’s why some quit to become pilots...