Is it true that appproximately 70 percent of human infectious diseases are animal related?
In the last 20 or 25 years, we term this as the age of emerging infectious diseases. During that 2 to 2.5 decades, approximately 75 percent of the new human diseases that emerged are zoonotic. We look back and, of the 1,461 human pathogens that we know about today, about 60 percent or what we would term multi-host pathogens – in other words (pathogens that) don’t reside just in people by themselves. There is actually contacts through animal or animal products or even plants that actually are responsible for what we call multi-host diseases. But in the last 2 to 3 decades these emerging or reemerging diseases are primarily zoonotic and we estimate it’s about 75 percent of those. What are some common zoonotic diseases? The common ones that people probably think about are, of course, rabies, which we see worldwide, and a disease called “brucellosis,” that we just are in the process of eliminating from the United States, found in cattle and goats. One of the forms of tuberculosis in cattle
