The acceleration of MERS Cases – VDU Blog
# 8508
I’m not quite sure how I missed it (I can only plead a recent lack of sleep & Arabic-twitter-reading induced psychosis) – but only now have I stumbled upon Saturday’s terrific guest blog by @influenza_bio on Dr. Ian Mackay’s VDU blog, that discusses the ever present threat posed by zoonotic diseases.
After providing a suitable background, and a quick overview of recent MERS outbreak history, @influneza_bio proceeds to explain why the MERS virus’s recent surge may be an early warning sign that this emerging coronavirus is evolving, and adapting to human hosts.
I’ll not give anymore away, other than to say you really want to read this article. Follow the link below to read:
Watching zoonoses evolve...
Special guest writer: @influenza_bio
For the first time in human history, we are watching diseases jump from animals to humans on a large scale. We've seen diseases appear for the first time in humans before; that's not new. We've seen HIV and several new strains of influenza emerge over the past century or so, for example. What is new is that we can now watch this process as it happens. We are able to watch animal diseases trickle case by case into humans, and we wonder whether any of these diseases might some day become human diseases. We wonder whether we might be watching pandemics develop in real time.
For another highly informative blog by @influenza_bio, check out Can we believe every H7N9 seroprevalence study we see?.
