i heard on educational TV that there are now thirty new animal-borne diseases. what i was wondering is: recenly, about what fraction of the world’s population have been killed by these diseases such as AIDS, SARS, rabies, monkey pox, etc.?
I don’t know about numbers, but when you’re talking infectious diseases, animal-borne or animal-spread is the rule rather than the exception. Most deadly infectious diseases have animal hosts.
Plus, there’s a distinction between diseases that freely spread back and forth between humans and animals (rabies, malaria, etc) and diseases that appear to have permanently jumped from animals to humans (HIV, SARS, etc).