One Health Movement News / One Health Topics 'in' the News

With the rise of Zika virus in the United States, many people are concerned not just about the risk of human infection, but also the possibility of animals being infected as well. Can pets get Zika? Can they carry it within their bodies and pass it on to humans?

Ninety people are undergoing hospital checks in remote northern Russia because of an anthrax outbreak that killed a boy on Monday.

Eight people are confirmed as infected with anthrax, a rare but deadly bacterial disease. It is believed to have spread from reindeer.

More than 2,300 reindeer have died in the outbreak, in the Yamalo-Nenets region of Siberia. Reindeer-herding families have been moved out.

At least one child has died in Siberia after an outbreak of naturally occurring anthrax, which has been linked to a decades-old reindeer carcass exposed during a heatwave.

Russian officials have said the death of a 12-year-old boy, a member of a reindeer-herding family from the Yamal tundra 1,300 miles north of Moscow, was the first fatality in Siberia linked to the pathogen since 1941. Twenty others have been diagnosed with anthrax, according to CBS.

 Many deadly diseases that afflict humans were originally acquired through contact with animals. New research suggests that pathogens can also jump the species barrier to move from humans to animals. The study shows that green monkeys in The Gambia acquired Staphylococcus aureus from humans.

In September 2005, Senior UN System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza David Nabarro made a public statement that bird flu could kill as many as 150 million people. The virus – H5N1 avian influenza – was only spread by birds but was already having a huge impact on people in South East Asia: 55 percent of people hospitalized with this infection since 2003 had died and there was emerging evidence that the virus was spreading further.

Laura Kahn from the Program on Science & Global Security of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University is interviewed