{"id":4247,"date":"2023-08-01T20:16:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T01:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=4247"},"modified":"2023-08-01T20:16:04","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T01:16:04","slug":"could-the-next-pandemic-start-at-the-county-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/08\/01\/could-the-next-pandemic-start-at-the-county-fair\/","title":{"rendered":"Could the Next Pandemic Start at the County Fair?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

New York Times<\/a> Since 2011, there have been more human swine flu cases reported in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Most have occurred at farm-animal showcases. It was showtime at the youth swine exhibition, and the pig barn was bustling. The competitors, ages 3 to 21, were practicing their walks for the show ring and brushing pig bristles into place. Parents were braiding children\u2019s hair, adding ribbons and pig-shaped barrettes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Andrew Bowman, a molecular epidemiologist at Ohio State University, was striding through the barn in waterproof green overalls, searching for swine snot. As he slipped into one pen, a pig tried to nose its way out, then started nibbling his shoelaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Bowman prefers not to enter the pens, he said, as he wiped gauze across the animal\u2019s nose. He soon spotted a more appealing subject: a pig sticking its nose out from between the bars of its enclosure. \u201cWe have a total bias for snouts out,\u201d he said. Later, back in the lab, Dr. Bowman and his colleagues would discover that several of the snouts snuffling around this busy barn in New Lexington, Ohio, were harboring influenza. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world is emerging from a pandemic that killed at least 6.9 million<\/a> people. It won\u2019t be the last. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, which can spread between animals and humans, have become more frequent in recent decades, and animal pathogens will continue spilling over into human populations in the years ahead. To Americans, spillover might seem like a distant problem, a danger that dwells in places like the live animal market in Wuhan, China, that may have been the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s this real feeling here in the U.S. that disease is something that comes from elsewhere,\u201d said Ann Linder, an associate director at the animal law and policy program at Harvard Law School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is real risk in our own backyards<\/a> \u2014 and barnyards. Since 2011, there have been more confirmed human cases of swine flu in the United States than anywhere else in the world. (That may be because other nations are doing less testing and surveillance, and many cases here and abroad are likely to go undetected, experts say.) Most have been linked to agricultural shows and fairs. \u201cThey have become kind of hot spots,\u201d Ms. Linder said.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Times Since 2011, there have been more human swine flu cases reported in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Most have occurred at farm-animal showcases. It was showtime at the youth swine exhibition, and the pig barn was bustling. The competitors, ages 3 to 21, were practicing their walks for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4248,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247\/revisions\/4248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}