The new coronavirus from China is starting to slowly spread. Another new/undiscovered disease waiting to infect and claim lives.
To someone with knowledge on medicine, particularly epidemiology, how did diseases like SARS, MERS-COV, Swine Flu, and this new coronavirus get formed?
How do we contain them and how do we cure them as well?
And why does it seem that many kinds of diseases emerge from China?
Black plague was said to have originated from there
In: Biology
A lot of new pathogens aren’t *new*, they’re new at infecting us. They’re an evolutionary step from something that infected something else, like a bird or pig, into something that can infect humans.
One of the reasons why you see this happen in places like Southern China is that this jump typically isn’t some random sort of thing, it happens from having a lot of interaction between humans and other species. On top of that, it is a chance based thing, so the more interactions and the more individuals, the more likely a jump is to occur.
So in some areas you have a lot of people trading/keeping a lot of livestock and wild animals, and using the same land/water supply as those animals. This doesn’t only happen in China, and it isn’t the only way for a ‘new’ disease to pop up, but it is a really efficient way.
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