A team of health experts on Tuesday called for the U.S. "to lead a global effort to protect people from new outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases that originate in animals, such as swine flu, AIDS and SARS," Reuters writes (Morgan, 9/22).
The appeal comes as a U.S. Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council report concluded that "significant weaknesses undermine the global community's abilities to prevent, detect early, and respond efficiently to potentially deadly species-crossing microbes, such as the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus sweeping the globe," according to a National Academies press release. The report also notes, "species-jumping pathogens have caused more than 65 percent of infectious disease outbreaks in the past six decades."
"Zoonotic diseases are like wildfires, which flare up unexpectedly and can take a significant toll on human and animal health and damage household livelihoods as well as national economies. All too often, our reaction to these outbreaks has been to try containing a wildfire after it has gotten out of control," Marguerite Pappaioanou, executive director of the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges, said in the release. "We need a system that enables us to prevent the conditions for these disease flare-ups to occur in the first place and to spot them earlier when we can take more effective and measured actions to limit the damage" (9/22).
"The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) should be among the federal government agencies that lead efforts to develop a worldwide system, said the authors of the report, who developed a detailed plan for establishing and funding a comprehensive system to identify new zoonotic disease threats as early as possible in order to reduce the risk to humans and the impact on livestock," HealthDay News/MSN reports (Preidt, 9/22).
Though "[a] fully integrated global system could cost about $800 million a year to maintain," the authors note that the cost "is a relatively small sum compared with the $200 billion in economic losses caused by species-jumping viruses and other pathogens over the past decade," Reuters writes (9/22).