Why are zoonotic diseases getting so much attention lately?
I think the medical field is just relearning what we knew thousands of years ago. There was always an understanding, back in Roman times, in Greek times, and so forth — people knew that they could get diseases from their animals. And in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, because of the effectiveness of antibiotics, we stopped seeing a lot of infections in people, and medicine shifted to cardiology and oncology and other fields that didn’t relate. So I think we kind of forgot about this relationship with infectious diseases, and now we’re seeing a resurgence of them. As human populations grow, as global travel becomes easier, we start to see more diseases. 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
