Emerging Diseases of the 21st Century

A lethal form of encephalitis broke out in Malaysia in September 1998. Oddly, its first victims were all ethnic Chinese who worked on pig farms. More than half of them died after suffering from fevers, headaches, and neurological symptoms such as confusion, convulsions, and coma. Epidemiologists considered several possible sources in Malaysia for the virus and determined that the reservoir species from which the pigs had been infected were two species of flying foxes, large fruit-eating bats. Nipah virus encephalitis is an example of an emerging infectious disease. In the middle of the 20th century, the invention of antibiotics and new vaccines led to optimism that infectious diseases would soon be a thing of the past. This chapter takes a different slant on the term emerging and look at other disease phenomena that are emergent in the 21st century. Tobacco spread from the Americas to the rest of the world in several phases corresponding to the stages of globalization.

Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · History