Okay, this kind of definately sucks . . . but . . . all those new movies and novels pretending to be science fiction that are about killer plagues wiping out humanity and worse . . . well, over the past fourty years, the number of new diseases and plague potentials have quadrupeled and it looks like it’s only going to keep accellerating.  The map above is a prediction scale of areas where new plagues are likely to originate.  Red are the potential plague zones and green are areas less likely to originate killer diseases that wipe out humanity.  Guess what color I live in?

In the new study, researchers from four institutions analyzed 335 emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004, then converted the results into maps correlated with human population density, population changes, latitude, rainfall and wildlife biodiversity. They showed that disease emergences have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years. Some 60% of the diseases traveled from animals to humans (such diseases are called zoonoses) and the majority of those came from wild creatures. With data corrected for lesser surveillance done in poorer countries, "hot spots" jump out in areas spanning sub-Saharan Africa, India and China; smaller spots appear in Europe, and North and South America.

"We are crowding wildlife into ever-smaller areas, and human population is increasing," said coauthor Marc Levy, a global-change expert at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), an affiliate of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. "The meeting of these two things is a recipe for something crossing over." The main sources are mammals. Some pathogens may be picked up by hunting or accidental contact; others, such as Malaysia’s Nipah virus, go from wildlife to livestock, then to people. Humans have evolved no resistance to zoonoses, so the diseases can be extraordinarily lethal.

Definately sucks.  Our world health resources tend to be concentrated in the areas with the least potential for problems . . . the red areas tend to have the least resources and the least sensible monitoring.  Back when Taiwan got hit by the SARS panic, I was one of the folks who was quarantined in hospital as a possible victim (no, I did not have SARS but I did have enough common symptoms to be a supected case – a week of fear in a scary isolation room was not a happy time) so this is not cheerful news.