Animal-to-Human Transmission Quotes

Great Britain had a much different situation than we do and did here in the United States, in that they had literally thousands of infected animals with human health risks. Their infectivity in this disease happened before very much was known about it.

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

The avian influenza found in mainland British Columbia poses no significant threat to human health.

It's been studied to the point where we know that the impact on humans would be from consuming the most infected parts of the cow; that is, the brain and the spinal cord.

The guy was infected with bird flu because he took a sick chicken, slaughtered it and and then ate it.

If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.

There's always the danger when you have influenzas that infect chickens, that when you have the close quarters of chickens spreading from one to another and occasionally a human coming into close contact, that there will be the jumping of species from a chicken to a human. This is not something new.

We see new things all the time. We see new retroviruses out there - which is the category that HIV falls into - and we're very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans.

Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.