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Diseases from animals kill millions of people: study
Story Date: 7/6/2012
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Source: MEATINGPLACE, 7/5/12
Diseases transmitted from livestock to people who raise them account for more than 2 million human deaths a year worldwide, and growing demand for meat products could increase the danger, a new global study found.
The study, whose goal was to map areas of the globe where better disease control is needed, found that 13 diseases including tuberculosis, avian flu and hepatitis E were responsible for 1.4 billion cases of human illness and 2.2 million deaths a year.
"Exploding global demand for livestock products is likely to fuel the spread of a wide range of human-animal infectious diseases," said Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya and lead author of the study. "Targeting the diseases in the hardest hit countries is crucial to protecting global health as well as to reducing severe levels of poverty and illness.”
Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania and India have the highest levels of human illness and death from such diseases. However, the northeastern United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and parts of Southeast Asia may be so-called hotspots for emerging problems with diseases that are newly infecting humans, are newly virulent or have recently become drug resistant, the researchers said.
Rising global demand for meat presents an opportunity for millions of poor livestock keepers to move out of poverty if they can gain access to meat markets and participate in meeting the demand, the researchers said.
The study was conducted by the ILRI, the Institute of Zoology in the United Kingdom and the Hanoi School of Public Health in Vietnam. The findings were based on analysis of 1,000 surveys covering more than 10 million people, six million animals and 6,000 food or environmental samples.
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