Case StudyFinding, tracking and monitoring new carriers of infectious agents, be they human or animal, is important to the control of diseases, especially where the channels of infection are not yet fully known or understood. To do these things requires software that can easily look for correlations in a diverse mass of integrated data, and which provides the facility to develop large data resources available to all who need them. Fireflower provides this facility. Spread of emerging diseases
In North America and Northern Europe several wild species of animals provide reservoirs of a dangerous neurodegenerative disease, called transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). This disease has been detected in deer and elk herds in the wild, and in some carnivores (mink) in both Canada and the USA. If they share the same land with infected wild animals, TSE can be transmitted to domestic animals like cows where it is called BSE, and to domestic sheep and goats where it is called scrapie, and to humans where it is called CJD. The infective agent, a prion, can remain viable in the wild for many years, and can be spread in body fluids (saliva, urine) and from infected forage. The incubation period in animals is often many years. Once in a herd, the disease transmits vertically from mother to child, and laterally from animal to animal. Since the disease has a long incubation period, an infected, but non-symptomatic animal, can infect many others. That the disease is only transmitted through the ingestion of infected brain and spinal cord is a myth. Eating any part of an infected animal, even although it is non-symptomatic, can infect another animal or a human. Eating infected forage can infect another animal or human. There are good tests which can prevent infected but non-symptomatic animals being put into the human food chain, but they are effectively banned by many national governments. Changes in the global environment may well precipitate changes in human health and food production. Destruction of old habitats have forced changes in biodiversity and the distributions of surviving species. Emerging disease episodes have increased in the last two decades and most have involved infectious agents which have jumped species from animals to humans. According to the WHO (August 2007) new diseases are now emerging faster than at any time in history. From the recognition of a new disease, the steps to control it require an understanding of the new pathogen, epidemiological work to assess risks and spread, and the development of drugs, vaccines and other strategies to cure or prevent it. Fireflower provides the facilities to collect, organize, search and mine all aspects of the required data. |
