West, Central Africa seen as major source of next new disease
Pastor Dale Morgan
West, Central Africa seen as major source of next new disease*
PARIS, April 30 (AFP) Apr 30, 2008
West and Central Africa are emerging as the major potential sources for
the next new infectious disease, a study released on Wednesday said.
Deforestation in these regions is forcing wild animals that are a
natural host for pathogens into ever smaller areas and into ever
likelier contact with fast-growing human populations, it said.
The paper, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal
Society B, looks at how new, killer diseases such as AIDS, Ebola and
bird flu have leapt the species barrier to humans in the past three decades.
Its authors found that closely related primates -- monkeys, chimpanzees,
gorillas and humans -- pose the biggest risk of "host shift" as they
share similar biology and immune responses, and are vulnerable to many
of the same microbes.
The similarity is especially strong with chimpanzees, our closest
genetic relatives, with whom we shared a common ancestor about 8.6
million years ago.
Humans are almost four times likelier to share pathogens with
chimpanzees than with colobus monkeys, which branched from the family
tree 34.4 million years ago, says the study.
The virus for acquired immune deficiency syndrome was probably
transmitted to humans from a chimpanzee infected with a simian form of
AIDS, previous studies have said. More than 25 million people have died
of the disease since it was first reported in 1981.
But being distantly related is not a safeguard, either, the new study says.
Some pathogens, especially viruses, are smart at adapting to a new host
in close proximity.
"Bird flu, West Nile virus and Hendra virus are all viral diseases that
have jumped large evolutionary distances to infect humans," said lead
researcher Jonathan Davies of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Avian influenza and West Nile virus have a natural reservoir in birds,
while bats provide the host for Hendra virus.
"We suggest hotspots of future emerging diseases may be found where
humans come into close proximity with wild primates, as is increasingly
the case in the forests of Central and West Africa, due to rapidly
growing human populations and scarcity of resources," said co-author Amy
Pederson of the University of Sheffield, northern England.
"In addition, we are likely to see an increase in outbreaks of novel
viral diseases as humans invade previously isolated habitats, and these
may be just as likely to jump from a rat or a bat, as an ape."
Predicting host shifts could slash the risk, they said. Money could be
invested in projects to prevent human-animal contact and in building
early-warning networks to detect any disease outbreak.
In February, a paper published in the British journal Nature found that
the emergence of new diseases had roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years.
Its authors named the biggest potential source for a new animal-borne
disease, or zoonose, were East Asia, the Indian sub-continent, the Niger
delta and Africa's Great Lakes region.
The 2002-3 outbreak of severe acute respirary syndrome (SARS), which
originated in Chinese bats, cost 30 billion dollars although the death
toll was fewer than 800, according to World Health Organisation (WHO)
figures.