From: To: Jeffrey Epstein .<:[email protected]> Subject: Can you think of anything creative to "do" about this? Date: Thu. 18 Aug 2011 15:52:05 +0000 Emerging infectious diseases and cities Scientific American 18 Aug 2011 - Issue Relevant Byline: James Byrne When we were discussing the 'cities' theme that's running across all the blogs I didn't want to take the easy route. Connecting cities and disease is pretty easy, I could look at plague or cholera and be totally within the scope of the theme. Instead I remembered a little paper I had read while ago about the role cities play in the emergence of new infectious diseases. Commonly, we think the regions most likely be affected by the emergence of infectious diseases would be the developing nations but in fact very few studies have looked into the spatial arrangement of emerging infectious disease reporting. This has significant implications for funding of surveillance and research as typically developing nations lack the resources to adequately handle their current health burdens let alone monitoring for and dealing with new issues as they arise. So an emphasis must be placed on understanding how diseases emerge, where they emerge and what we can do about it. When we think about new infectious disease emergence often images of new diseases coming out of the jungle come to mind. While this is not necessarily wrong (as we shall see) it's not exactly correct either. It all comes down to your definition of 'emerging'. In their paper "Global trends in emerging infectious disease" Jones et al. define an emerging infectious disease as the original case or cluster of cases representing; newly evolved strains of existing human pathogens, completely new pathogens or re-emergent pathogens. Here a new strain of antibiotic resistant E. coli is considered equally to SARS or the re-emergence of M. tuberculosis in a population that had previously seen the disease disappear. When viewed like this, human p