Emerging and reemerging diseases are critical to humans.  These diseases are generally from zoonotic sources meaning they are diseases transferred from animals to humans.  The disease jumps species and what was nonlethal in that species is lethal in ours.  More than 70% of our human diseases come from animals. This is a spillover that is enabling these diseases to spread all over the world.

The Zika virus is devastating to pregnant women. As this disease destroys the fetus brain tissue and causing birth defects.  The child will never be normal or have a normal childhood.  Zika first appeared in 1947 in Africa and is transmitted by mainly mosquitos, however it can be obtained by blood transfusion and sexual intercourse.  This disease has caused people to want to kill off mosquitos despite the consequences as they are more worried of the children being born defective.

The Ebola virus is devastating to everyone as it has a 90% death rate of those that get the disease.  It first appeared in West Africa in 1976 and is highly contagious as it spreads through normal human contact and bodily fluids.  The disease came from bats as a young boy ate an infected bat and it spread from there.  We now know that from contact trace which helps to discover who patient zero was and where it went from there.  The infected persons should have been isolated and the people they were in contact with should have been quarantined however they did not recognize what the disease was.  If they isolated the cases the disease would have died out and no longer be in humans.

The Nipah virus is another emerging disease from the Bangladesh/ Asia region. ¾ of the people infected with this disease die.  This disease comes from fruit bats as they like to drink the same sap as the humans do.  These bats contaminate the sap however and give us the Nipah virus.  The virus is then transmissible through human saliva which can be very dangerous if they all drink the sap from the same cup.

We as humans are now vulnerable to all these emerging and remerging diseases.  This  is due to poor sanitation and even just taking care of the people we love that are sick because the disease spreads through contact.  Also, many people’s immune system is already weakened by something which is easier to infect.  We as humans keep invading the environment and going places we haven’t gone before. This now introduces whole new pathogens never seen before as they had their own separate habitat before.  We are the ones invading them. Us as humans are so unprepared for the disease to come next.  We are all linked together so we need to find a way to live in harmony.

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