If surveillance focuses only on diseases that have already emerged, we’ll remain behind the curve. Better prediction of future pandemics will need to integrate animal, planetary and human health.
People could have caught the virus from wild shrews.
Erhard Nerger/Getty Images
It’s not just mosquitos. Flooding, extreme heat and other climate-related hazards are bringing people into contact with pathogens more often, and affecting people’s ability to fight off disease.
Vaccination can help reduce the risk of monkeypox infection.
Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images
While the majority of monkeypox cases thus far have been recorded among men who have sex with men, everyone is still at risk of contracting the disease.
The goal of the public health emergency declaration is to prevent the monkeypox virus from becoming a widespread threat to public health.
ALIOUI Mohammed Elamine/iStock via Getty Images
Declaring monkeypox a national health emergency will allow the U.S. government to direct resources and funds where needed to help slow the spread of the virus.
Sindhi cattle near Amazon rainforest:
flexitarian diets could feed the growing world population without further encroaching onto wild habitat.
Lucas Ninno via GettyImages
Infectious diseases originating in wild animals are high and may be increasing. This is a sign that ecosystem degradation is undermining the planet’s capacity to sustain human wellbeing.
A health-care provider administers monkeypox vaccine at an outdoor walk-in clinic in Montréal, on July 23, 2022. It is crucial that people who have been exposed to monkeypox get vaccinated if they do not yet have symptoms, or isolate if they do have symptoms.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
To control monkeypox, there is a short window — weeks, not months — in which to vaccinate the most susceptible and to encourage and support self-isolation for those who have symptoms.
Polio is endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2022.
Sarah Poser, Meredith Boyter Newlove/CDC via AP
Drug discovery research in Africa receives modest but essential international funding through philanthropic foundations and selected pharmaceutical companies.
Child receiving the polio vaccine.
Asianet-Pakistan/Shutterstock
Saskatchewan leads the country in preventable, opportunistic illnesses enabled by poverty. With recent changes to income support programs and increased housing instability, things are getting worse.
Molecular research like that conducted at the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases in Nigeria is key to medical breakthroughs.
PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP via Getty Images
Molecular research is expensive, but worth it because of the burden of disease that it could relieve.
Electron micrograph of monkeypox virus particles isolated in 2003 in the United States from human samples (left, mature, oval viruses; right, immature, round viruses).
Cynthia S. Goldsmith, Russell Regner / CDC / AP
This is not the first time that the monkeypox virus has spread beyond Africa, its continent of origin. But the current epidemic is unprecedented for a number of reasons.
Magnified and colourized monkeypox virus particles. Since early May, over 550 confirmed cases of human infection with monkeypox virus have been reported in 30 countries.
(NIAID)
Recent outbreaks have drawn attention to monkeypox. Get answers to common questions about this relative of the smallpox virus, including transmission, symptoms and effectiveness of smallpox vaccine.
Can you use a test intended for adults or older children? How do you test a wriggling or grumpy small child anyway? We’re infection control and child health researchers. Here are our tips.
The strain of H5N1 bird flu identified in Canada, the United States and Europe can cause severe disease and high mortality in domestic poultry.
(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
Avian influenza virus — or bird flu — can infect domestic poultry such as chickens and turkeys, as well as wild birds. The H5N1 strain has been identified in Canada.