Animal Virus Epidemics

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

For centuries, much has been said and researched about diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans, this type of transfer is known as zoonosis. The consequences, in most cases, have been devastating. Precisely, now we are going through a coronavirus pandemic that has turned the world into an isolation zone that only seemed fictional history in movies or television series.

However, before now, there have been other viruses that mutated humans with dire consequences.

The so-called Spanish flu is theorized to have started the H1N1 strain as an avian virus that migrated to the pig environment. It occurred in 1918, spread to all continents, and infected 500 million people. According to BBC data, between 17 and 50 million people died; it is even presumed that the deaths could have reached 100 million.

Called in Spanish Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), HIV is a virus originating from apes, the strain of which is transmitted sexually. As in other cases, the species that develop it are not affected, except when transmitted to another host. For people it became deadly. Since the 80s, when it was unveiled, to date 75 million people worldwide have been infected, of whom 30 million have died.

With the scientific name of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), it is colloquially known as mad cow disease. This virus has an incubation period of five years and is acquired orally by consuming meat from animals that are contaminated, whose pathogen they received for being fed with the remains of other animals with this strain. It is claimed that there was a fatal outbreak in the late 1980s in the UK, but it had a variation in 1996 causing an epidemic.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) emerged in China in 2002. It is mentioned that civet or snive cats carry it after being infected by horseshoe bats living in caves. The first transmission was by zoonosis in a laboratory in China and it spreads rapidly. The pandemic was controlled in 2003, but the outbreak caused 8,198 infections with a total of 774 deaths. It is considered the first pandemic of the 21st century.

Another disease attributed to the bat, in this case that of fruit, is Ebola (EVE). Although there have been outbreaks since 1973, it was in 2014 and 2016 that the most intense ones occurred. It emerged in West Africa in countries such as Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria; however, it spread to the United States, Italy, and Spain. According to the World Health Organization, there were a total of 28 thousand 652 cases, between confirmed and probable carriers, with a total of 11 thousand 325 deaths.