Human encroachment into uninhabited parts of Southeast Asia exposed people to unusual animals and previously unknown pathogens, and global travel carried a tropical zoonotic disease to Toronto in 2003, Dr. Barrett Slenning told a gathering of public health professionals.
That transmission chain for severe acute respiratory syndrome would have been nearly impossible only a few decades ago, said Dr. Slenning of the Population Health and Pathobiology Department at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine.
“Economic globalization and climate change combine to allow people, plants, animals, products, markets, vectors, and contaminants to move very rapidly across the globe, creating a changing mix of biological systems with which we have never had to deal before,” Dr. Slenning said, adding that the dynamism of that mix augments the complexity of challenges in animal and human health.
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