Recently Emerged

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Recently Emerged Objectives

List factors that may explain why there are newly emerged infectious diseases and provide examples.
Explain how Ebola is transmitted, the impacts on an individual’s body, overall mortality rate, and the status of a vaccine.
Describe HIV structure, how it infects cells, the infection that progresses in a human over time, and how AIDS impacts the body.

Besides COVID-19, we have several other significant infectious diseases that have emerged in the past several decades.

AIDS has had the greatest impact of recently emerged infectious diseases. Now COVID-19 is surpassing AIDS and even TB in the number of adult deaths in some regions.

This video describes HIV infections and the widespread impact of AIDS.

This video provides a look at the basic structures and impacts of HIV.

This is a different set of visuals to clarify and reinforce HIV structure and impact on host cells.

COVID-19 Emergence

Q. Where did the coronavirus come from?

A. The specific animal species that harbored SARS-CoV-2 prior to infection of humans is still under investigation. The problem is that many animal species became infected at the potential site of the original human infection, and it is difficult to back-track the source. The original SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, and now SARS-CoV-2 are all beta-coronaviruses that are believed to have originated in bats. Another animals species may have been an intermediate host.

Q. Could this have been released, accidentally or not, from a laboratory?

A. Although this possibility exists for many diseases studied in labs, there is no evidence presented to support the idea that this virus was created in and/or released from a laboratory. Although many laboratories around the world harbor and research potential pathogens, and many studied SARS-CoV-1 during and after that outbreak, this pathogen is genetically distinct enough it likely developed within animal hosts. It was also widely predicted that a new potentially lethal coronavirus like SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV would transfer to humans from an animal source.

The next section introduces recent outbreaks.

Check your knowledge. Can you:

list factors that may explain why there are newly emerged infectious diseases and provide examples?
explain how Ebola is transmitted, the impacts on an individual’s body, overall mortality rate, and the status of a vaccine?
describe HIV structure, how it infects cells, the infection that progresses in a human over time, and how AIDS impacts the body?