Emerging infections, the " Destiny of infectious diseases " revisited

This third lesson dealt with the conditions under which infectious emergences occur, especially zoonotic ones, requiring the completion of a complex " specifications " of successive stages enabling a species jump from animal pathogen to human. They occur in conditions where human behavior plays a major role, often guided by food insecurity, which induces attitudes such as human penetration of areas inhabited by wild fauna, or ecosystem changes linked to intensive farming and stockbreeding, all of which increase the risk of human-wildlife contact, and hence of spill-over events, most often abortive, but sometimes successful when the pathogen finds a (relatively) permissive human host. The pandemic threat is global, due to the increasing density and mobility of the human population. The second part of this lecture looked at current approaches to the anticipation and early detection of emerging epidemic events, and the emergence of an integrated approach to the early management of emerging infections with pandemic potential.