Search

Animal diseases, foodborne pathogens and foodborne diseases have enormous impacts upon the health and livelihoods of producers and consumers in developing and in-transition countries. Unfortunately, the capacity for effective surveillance of infectious disease threats is often limited in these countries, leading to chronic under-reporting. This further contributes towards underestimating the effects of these diseases and an inability to implement effective control measures. However, innovative communications and diagnostic tools, as well as new analytical approaches and close cooperation within and between the animal and human health sectors, can be used to improve the coverage, quality and speed of reporting, as well as to generate more comprehensive estimates of the disease burden. These approaches can help to tackle endemic diseases and build essential surveillance capacities to address changing disease threats in the future.

Potential climate driven changes in the epidemiology of human and animal disease are widely discussed and complex to assess. Recent spreads of exotic pathogens or vectors feed speculations; although most of these introductions are mainly linked to the increased worldwide traffic, trade of goods and transportation of animal and human, abiotic factors are known to impact on vectors and pathogens bionomics and their ability to establish in new ecosystems; altogether changes in climatic patterns and in seasonal conditions may affect disease behaviour in term of spread pattern, diffusion range, amplification and persistence in novel habitats. Invasion may result in the emergence of novel disease processes, presenting major challenges for the epidemiologists. In this paper, some of the ecological mechanisms underlying the impact of climatic change on disease transmission and disease spread are further described. Potential effects of different climatic variables on pathogens and hosts population dynamics and distributions are complex to assess and different approaches are used to describe the dynamics in ecological range and the availability of ecological niches for pathogens and vectors. However even when linkage between disease dynamics and climate change are relatively strong, there are always other factors also changing disease behaviour and these should be accounted for as well.