Study urges new focus in hunt for emerging diseases

LONDON (Reuters) - Health experts are mostly looking in the wrong places for the next AIDS, Ebola, or bird flu and should shift resources from rich countries to the developing world as most likely to spawn the next big disease, researchers say.

Many of the emerging disease danger zones were most likely to be found in the developing world, where abundant wildlife bumps up against growing human populations, the researchers wrote in a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

These areas are important because about 60 percent of the infections that have emerged since 1940 originated in animals before jumping to humans, the international research team said.

The HIV virus that causes AIDS has been traced to chimpanzees and Ebola may have come from bats, for example.

"We conclude that global resources to counter disease emergence are poorly allocated, with the majority of the scientific and surveillance effort focused on countries from where the next important emerging infectious disease is least likely to originate," they wrote.

The team analyzed 335 diseases that emerged in humans between 1940 and 2004. Their work showed infections were increasing and they used a computer model to map "hotspots" of regions where future outbreaks would likely start.

Parts of central America, tropical Africa and south Asia posed the greatest risk but many prevention efforts wrongly centered on richer, developed countries of Europe, North America, Australia and some parts of Asia, the research team said.

"Protecting areas rich in wildlife diversity from development may also have a significant effect in preventing future disease emergence," said Kate Jones, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London who led the study.

The researchers defined emerging diseases as infections that appear in people or move into regions for the first time. They include diseases transmitted from animals and infections originating in humans such as drug-resistant tuberculosis.

The human and financial toll of these diseases can be devastating. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people and the financial costs have also been high.