This highly contagious virus may be a new variant of superflu, a highly contagious virus that may have originated in some backcountry in Asia or Africa through wild animals or domestic animals such as chickens or pigs infect humans. Once the first person has contracted the unknown and unknown new disease, they can quickly spread to family, friends and those who have been in contact with them through droplets from coughs and sneezes.
With the world so crowded and well connected, the apocalyptic virus may have begun to spread across the world by air, road and water before medical elites could begin to decipher its genetic mysteries. Before it was named, it may have caused a global epidemic. If the new virus had followed the pattern of the 1918-1919 epidemic, it would have killed a large number of healthy young people. They died of what's called a Cytokine storm, when a virus causes their potent immune systems to overreact. This uncontrolled reaction causes them to develop fever and overwhelm their bodies through nausea and fatigue. An overreacted immune system will ultimately kill the person, not kill the supervirus.
Oxford's predictions are based on historical patterns. The past century has indeed provided us with many precedents in this regard. For example, the 2003 global outbreak of Sars, a severe respiratory infection that killed nearly 1,000 people, was transmitted to humans through Chinese civet cats. In November 2002, the virus first spread to people working in a live animal market in Guangdong, where civet cats were sold. Thanks to modern technology and population growth, the danger posed by this zoonotic disease is now greater than ever. Modes of transportation such as air transport can cause emerging zoonotic diseases to spread rapidly around the world, causing a global pandemic. The Sars virus was spread by a Chinese professor of respiratory medicine who took the virus elsewhere by treating a patient while traveling in Hong Kong. In February 2003, the virus spread around the world through passengers on flights. Between March and July 2003, there were approximately 8,400 potential Sars infections in 32 countries.
Similar to H1N1 swine flu, the infectious disease infected hundreds of millions of people worldwide in 2009. It is now thought to have originated in pig herds in Mexico, and people infected with the virus traveled by plane to different destinations, leading to a global outbreak of swine flu. Once these smuggled viruses get on a plane, they don't have to learn a new language or new local customs. Genetically, we humans are not very different, an epidemic that can kill people in one part of the world can also kill people in another part of the world effortlessly. In addition, our risk of contracting this deadly infectious disease through wildlife is increasing due to the human encroachment on the world's jungles and rainforests, where we are more exposed to animals that have evolved and hidden within wildlife populations for thousands of years of unknown viruses.
An international team of researchers announced last week that it had identified a new African virus that killed two Congolese teenagers in 2009. The virus causes an acute hemorrhagic fever that causes bleeding from seven orifices and can be fatal within days. A 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who attended the same school suddenly fell ill and died soon after. A week after the little girl died, a nurse who treated her nearly died after developing similar symptoms. The new virus was named Lower Congo Virus (BASV) based on the province of the three victims. This virus is from the same family as baculoviruses including rabies.
A report published in the journal PLOS Pathogens said the virus may have originated in local wildlife and spread to humans through insect bites or other currently unknown means. There are plenty of other new virus candidates waiting for their moment in the wings, guts, breath and blood of animals around us. For example, you can get leprosy from armadillos, which carry the leprosy virus in their scales, the animals responsible for one-third of leprosy patients in the United States. Horses can transmit the Hendra virus, which causes fatal respiratory and neurological diseases in humans. In a new book, award-winning American natural history author David Kuiman argues that many infectious diseases that are said to have originated in animals are now strongly consistent. They generally get worse
Kuiman highlighted the Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus that first hit Zaire in 1976. The virus is astonishingly capable, with a 90 percent mortality rate for those infected. The latest outbreak of the Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus emerged last month in Congo, which reportedly killed 36 of the 81 infected patients. According to Kuiman, the Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus likely originated in bats. The bats were transmitted to African apes, and the apes may have contracted the infection through contact with bat feces. The virus was then transmitted to hunters who ate bushmeat. Kuiman believes the same pattern of transmission exists for HIV, which may have originated in a chimpanzee in Cameroon.
Studies of the virus's genes suggest that HIV may have first evolved in 1908, and the virus was not found in populations in large African cities until the 1960s. By the 1980s, it had spread to the Americas by air transport. The virus has since killed around 30 million people and infected another 33 million. What makes Ebola and HIV better than other viruses is that they cannot be spread by coughing and sneezing. "The Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus can be spread through direct contact with bodily fluids," Kuiman explained. "By preventing that contact, infection can be prevented. If HIV could be spread through the air, you and I might have died. If rabies could have passed through Airborne, it's going to be one of the most feared pathogens in the world."
Viruses like Ebola have another limitation in transmission. They can kill quickly or make people sick very quickly. To cause a national pandemic, zoonotic diseases need their human hosts to infect and live as long as possible so the virus can spread better globally. But there is one zoonotic disease that does all of that. This is our old adversary - the flu. It is easily spread through the air, such as by sneezing or coughing. The same goes for Sars. But the flu has more advantages. "Symptoms in a person with Sars often appear before, rather than after, the person is severely infected," Kuiman said. "This allows many people with Sars to be identified, hospitalized, and isolated before they are at their most contagious. But epidemics That's not the case with colds and many other diseases."
It takes a while for people infected with a new and potentially deadly variant of the flu to get sick, during which time they carry the virus everywhere they go. These reasons have led Oxford, the world's epidemic authority, to warn that a new round of global influenza outbreaks of animal origin is inevitable. That could happen soon, he said. "I think we're going to have another global flu pandemic, it's unavoidable. It could happen in 2017-2018." But are we fully prepared for this? Oxford warned that close surveillance is the only thing we can do.
He said: "New flu variants are an everyday problem and we have to be on high alert for them. Now we have scientific methods that can quickly identify the genome of a virus that causes a new disease. That's how we know what we're facing. What virus. Next we have to develop and stockpile vaccines and antiviral drugs to fight this new variant." But Oxford worries that politicians won't take these causes of death very seriously. The enormous price human beings pay for such negligence amounts to criminal negligence. Humans can only win, not lose, against emerging diseases of animal origin. As long as the epidemic virus wins once, mankind will go to extinction.
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