India, a hotspot of rising pandemics

An article published in the journal Nature has implicated that India is a hotspot for Emerging Infectious Diseases (EIDs) in a study by international teams including researchers from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), the US-based University of Georgia and Columbia University's Earth Institute.

The scientists analysed 335 incidents of previous disease emergence from 1940 onwards and found that zoonoses the disease of animal which can be communicated to humans such as bird flu, rabies, plague, Japanese encephalitis etc.

This study holds importance in the light of emergence of several cases of bird flu recently, including SARS and the Ebola virus, originated in mammals.

Kate Jones, a biodiversity scientist at ZSL said, “India risks new epidemics as the human population expands into natural wilderness, coming into contact with a diverse range of wildlife that harbours unusual diseases.”

While Marc Levy the co author of the research said, “We are crowding wildlife into ever-smaller areas, and human population is increasing. The meeting of these two things is a recipe for something crossing over.”

The researchers warned that intruding the area of high biodiversity must be avoided to prevent such pandemic on this earth.

The research found that the emergence zoonoses have increased to four fold in the past 50 years. There was a concern against the deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic which has robbed the whole world, and insect transmitted disease as a response to the swift climatic change.

In addition to this the researchers prepared a detail map of the world hotspots having the potential EDIs. India’s neighboring countries too face the same threat including sub-Sahara nation. Most of the pandemics include the multi-drug resistant strains of previously known pathogens while kept Europe and South America at the least side of such emergence.

This significant study can bring the attention to conserve our biodiversity which is losing at fast rate; the association of zoonoses with changing climate pattern is indeed an eye-opener.