Diseases are beat, or not..:-(
Posted : February 20, 2006 at 11:13 am [America/Los_Angeles]
Humans are accumulating new pathogens at a rate of one per year. This accumulation of new pathogens has been going on for millennia - this is how we acquired TB, malaria, smallpox. But at the moment, this accumulation does seem to be happening very fast. So it seems there is something special about modern times - these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population. The sort of image I want to get away from is the famous statement from the 1960s when the US Surgeon General said, ‘diseases were beat’. Pathogens are evolving ways to combat our control methods. The picture is changing and looks as if it will continue to. We’re going to have to run as fast as we can to stay in the same place.
- Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University Of Edinburgh, UK
Global Warming, Oil Shortage and now this. Wonder which one is going to take us down first 
- Anand
Category: Health |
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