Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.
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Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.
There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.
Left to their own devices, epidemic diseases tend to follow the same basic process: A virus or bacteria infects a host, who typically becomes sick and in many cases dies. Along the way, the host infects others.
There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.
We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system.
Because pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human, it's work that takes me all around the globe - from rain forest hunting camps of central Africa to wild animal markets of east Asia.
It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.
The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely... And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us.
Without an adequate response, an epidemic can develop into a pandemic, which generally means it has spread to more than one continent.
Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet.
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