What part do zoonotic diseases play in the overall landscape of emerging infectious diseases?
If we look at wildlife, if we look at diseases in animals, we can start to understand and predict somewhat what might be the next emerging disease. Also [it helps] to change our behavior in terms of how we’re getting those diseases. So the wildlife market, the bushmeat trade, the handling, the international trade in wildlife — all predispose us to getting these new emerging diseases. Can you give us some examples of how zoonotic outbreaks happen? Well, we have things like rabies — which we take for granted in the United States because we vaccinate our pets and we don’t come in contact with bats very often. But in parts of the world that are very poor, for example in India, 40 to 50,000 people are dying from rabies every year. So this is a kind of global disease that affects different populations very differently. And HIV/AIDS is a very different story. It’s about people in one part of the world that have this practice of hunting monkeys and handling them, and this virus jumped betwee
