The bushmeat industry has been a topic of increasing importance among both conservationists and public health officials for its influence on zoonotic disease transmission and animal conservation. While the association between infectious diseases and the bushmeat trade is well established in the research community, risk perception among bushmeat hunters and traders has not been well characterized. I conducted surveys of 123 bushmeat hunters and traders in rural Sierra Leone to investigate hunting practices and awareness of zoonotic disease risk associated with the bushmeat trade. Twenty-four percent of bushmeat hunters and traders reported knowledge of disease transmission from animals to humans.
Formal education did not significantly affect awareness of zoonotic disease transmission. Individuals who engaged exclusively in preparation and trading of bushmeat were more likely to accidentally cut themselves compared to those who primarily engaged in bushmeat hunting (P < 0.001). In addition,
This chapter summarizes what is known about the historical effects of climate extremes on human health. The following section describes studies of infectious diseases and climate extremes related to El Niño Southern Oscillation. The next considers the impacts of short-term extremes of temperature.
The final section contains a discussion of climate-related disasters.
The current project, Infectious Diseases: preparing for the future, looks ahead10–25 years. Its aim has been to assess the future threat of diseases in plants, animals and humans, and to develop a vision of how those challenges could be managed through new systems for disease detection, identification and monitoring (DIM).
Africa has been a key consideration, in line with the priorities of the UK presidencies of the G8 and EU in 2005. This report brings together all of the African strands of the project.
This guidance document on ethical issues that arise specifically in the context of infectious disease outbreaks aims to complement existing guidance on ethics in public health. It should therefore be read in conjunction with more general guidance on issues such as public health surveillance, research with human participants, and addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. Setting up decision-making systems and procedures in advance is the best way to ensure that ethically appropriate decisions will be made if an outbreak occurs.
Countries, health-care institutions,international organizations and others involved in epidemic response efforts are encouraged to develop practical strategies and tools to apply the principles in this guidance document to their specific settings, taking into account local social,cultural, and political contexts. WHO is committed to providing countries with technical assistance in support of these efforts.
The world is becoming more urban every day, and the process has been ongoing since the industrial revolution in the 18th century. The United Nations now estimates that 3.9 billion people live in urban centres. The rapid influx of residents is however not universal and the developed countries are already urban, but the big rise in urban population in the next 30 years is expected to be in Asia and Africa.
Urbanisation leads to many challenges for global health and the epidemiology of infectious diseases. New megacities can be incubators for new epidemics, and zoonotic diseases can spread in a more rapid manner and become worldwide threats. Adequate city planning and surveillance can be powerful tools to improve the global health and decrease the burden of communicable diseases.
Current global health policy is dominated by a preoccupation with infectious diseases and in particular with emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases that threaten to ‘break out’ of established patterns of prevalence or virulence into new areas and new victims. This paper seeks to link a set of dominant narratives about epidemics and infectious disease with what is often called the architecture, or organizational landscape, of global health policy. A series of dichotomies helps to distinguish and valorise epidemics policies. Fast- versus slow-twitch models of disease, global versus local models of culture, and official versus unofficial models of knowledge provide categories according to which policies can be evaluated, designed and implemented. As a result, policy on the global scale has tended to be oriented towards addressing highly time-focussed outbreaks that threaten to cross international boundaries rather than longer-term endemic problems the affect the most vulnerable people.