BharatNotes Zoonosis
noun (countable; plural zoonoses)Usage in a UPSC answer
As India deepens its commitment to the One Health framework, the governance challenge is to pre-empt the next zoonosis at the animal-human-environment interface, since over sixty per cent of emerging infectious diseases — from the Nipah outbreaks in Kerala to COVID-19 — originate in animal reservoirs.
Synonyms
Antonyms
Word Family
zoonoses (n pl), zoonotic (adj), zoonotically (adv), zoonosis (n)
Root
Greek zōon = animal + nosos = disease; coined by Rudolf Virchow in the 19th century
Etymology
From Greek zōon ("animal") + nosos ("disease"); coined by Rudolf Virchow in the 19th century.
Memory Hook
"ZOO + NOSOS" — a disease (Greek nosos) that leaps from the ZOO (Greek zoon, animal) to you: animals passing illness to humans.
How This Word Works in UPSC Writing
An infectious disease transmissible from animals to humans. Two figures circulate and they are not interchangeable, which is the precision worth carrying: about 60 per cent of all known human infectious diseases are zoonotic, whereas up to 75 per cent of newly emerging infectious diseases are, and it is the higher figure for emerging disease that makes spillover the frontier of pandemic risk. The drivers are anthropogenic rather than natural accidents, which is what makes the subject a governance question: land-use change and deforestation push people and livestock into contact with wildlife reservoirs, wildlife trade and live animal markets concentrate species that would never otherwise meet, intensive animal agriculture creates dense and genetically uniform populations in which pathogens amplify, and antimicrobial use in livestock selects for resistance. That aetiology is the argument for One Health, which treats human, animal and environmental health as a single surveillance problem rather than three separate ones.
Don’t Confuse It With
A zoonosis passes from animals to humans, while an anthroponosis passes only between humans and a sapronosis is acquired from an environmental reservoir such as soil or water. A reservoir is the host in which a pathogen persists, whereas an intermediate or amplifying host bridges it to humans. Spillover is the transmission event itself. Note that about 60 per cent of known human infectious diseases are zoonotic against up to 75 per cent of emerging ones, so the two percentages answer different questions and should not be used interchangeably.
Hindi Meaning
पशुजन्य रोग (pashujanya rog) or ज़ूनोसिस.
Common Questions
- What proportion of infectious diseases are zoonotic?
- About 60 per cent of all known human infectious diseases, and up to 75 per cent of newly emerging ones, which is why spillover is central to pandemic risk.
- What drives zoonotic spillover?
- Deforestation and land-use change bringing people into contact with wildlife, wildlife trade and live animal markets, intensive animal agriculture, and antimicrobial use in livestock.
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