Africa Needs Disease Warning Systems

From Cosmos Magazine:

BARCELONA: Africa needs early warning systems to deal with the increased threat of disease spreading from wild animals to humans caused by climate change, health experts say.

Speaking at the International Union for Conservation of Nature congress in Barcelona, Spain, the scientists said that many wildlife pathogens, such as Ebola, may spread as a result of changing temperatures and precipitation caused by climate change

Monitoring patterns

"Building warning systems and undertaking disease surveillance in places like the Congo Basin would be cheaper than building expensive machines to control an outbreak," said William Karesh, head of the Field Veterinary Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

The early warning systems he suggested include monitoring disease patterns in wild animals, and monitoring environmental changes and how these affect the behaviour of wild animals and pathogens.

According to Karesh, these offer both fertile ground for building early warning systems and areas for future research. "Wild animals are more susceptible to new diseases than domesticated animals, and are good indicators of an impending outbreak," he said.

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