Peter Daszak

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Peter Daszak is a British-American zoologist and an expert in infection epidemiology , specializing, among other things, in the field of zoonoses . He is president of in New York City resident EcoHealth Alliance , a US-based non-profit and non-governmental organization supported the action and research programs to international health promotion.

Education

Daszak obtained a B.Sc. from the University College of North Wales (UCNW) in 1987. in zoology and in 1994 at the University of East London the Ph.D. in the field of parasitic infectious diseases .

Professional background

After graduating, Daszak worked at Kingston University , in Surrey , England . In the late 1990s he moved to the United States , to the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia . He also worked at the National Center for Infectious Diseases, part of the Georgia- based state centers for disease control and prevention . He then moved to New York City to lead a research team at the Consortium for Conservation Medicine that studies infectious diseases and disease threats around the world.

Daszak is a professor at several universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health . He has been working in the interdisciplinary field of conservation medicine for a long time .

His research is devoted to the question of the predictability and effects of new diseases in wildlife, farm animals and humans. Among other things, he takes part in studies of epidemics caused by the Nipah virus , the Henipavirus , the SARS virus , the Mers virus and the West Nile virus .

Daszak is a member of several advisory boards such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature , the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Academy of Sciences , and the United States Department of the Interior . He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and Chairman of the Forum on Microbial Threats of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and sits on the Board of Directors of the One Health Commission.

Daszak was one of 30 members of a group of experts that met at the World Health Organization in Geneva in February 2018 and issued a warning in the final report about the possibility of a pandemic that could spread in the near future due to an as yet unknown pathogen . This unknown disease, which the group therefore named Disease X , placed them on a list of eight pathogens, whose intensive research was recommended as a high priority.

Publications

By early 2020 he was involved in the creation of over 300 scientific papers and is referred to as a Highly Cited Researcher on the Web of Science . In addition to publications for the professional world, his work is also reported in popular science reports, from magazines and newspapers to television programs and podcasts .

Interviews

During times of epidemics, he is consulted by the media as an expert on infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans. In interviews, he pleads for the State, forward-looking measures in terms of preparedness (in English: Preparedness ) to be able to prevent future epidemics.

At the time of the Ebola epidemic in western Africa, he spoke in an interview in 2014 about the economic context of crisis management. He said researchers found it would be more cost-effective to counteract the threats of a future pandemic from novel viruses than to seek a global solution after an infectious disease has broken out.

At the beginning of February 2020, when the novel coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 began to spread beyond the borders of China , he explained to the presenter of a Canadian television station the conditions under which an epidemic would be upgraded to a pandemic and what consequences would be expected. As soon as an epidemic is found on two continents and spreads through human transmission through a community (in English: community transmission ), it is to be expected that the World Health Organization (WHO) will declare it a pandemic. In his opinion, the epidemic in the present case should already be equated with the infectious disease predicted under the name Disease X.

In April 2020, during an interview in the US political magazine, Democracy Now , he contradicted the then widespread theory that the SARs-CoV-2 virus could be the result of a laboratory accident at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan . He called such claims " pure baloney " (in English: pure baloney ). In doing so, he referred to his own collaboration with the institute, defended the professionalism of the laboratory staff and explained the circumstances that arise from the trade in wild animals on the so-called wet market in Wuhan .

Publications (selection)

Individual evidence

  1. Peter Daszak: Ultrastructural study of the effects of the ionophore lasalocid ... (dissertation). 1993, accessed April 22, 2020 .
  2. a b Peter Daszak, PhD. In: Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Retrieved April 20, 2020 .
  3. Infection Risk Map: Where New Epidemics Threaten the World. In: Der Spiegel . February 21, 2008, accessed April 22, 2020 .
  4. ^ Scott Norris: A New Voice in Conservation: Conservation medicine seeks to bring ecologists, veterinarians, and doctors together around a simple unifying concept: health . In: BioScience . tape 51 , no. 1 , January 2001, p. 7-12 , doi : 10.1641 / 0006-3568 (2001) 051 [0007: ANVIC] 2.0.CO; 2 .
  5. Kai Kupferschmidt: Is the dangerous Mers virus suddenly becoming more contagious? In: The time . May 2, 2014, accessed April 22, 2020 .
  6. ^ Kai Kupferschmidt: Germs and Camels. In: Der Tagesspiegel . May 2, 2014, accessed April 22, 2020 .
  7. Peter Daszak. In: TEDMED . Retrieved April 20, 2020 .
  8. a b Dr. Peter Daszak. In: EcoHealth Alliance. Retrieved April 20, 2020 .
  9. Peter Daszak: We knew Disease X was Coming. It's here now. We need to stop what drives mass epidemics rather than just respond to individual diseases. In: The New York Times . February 27, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  10. 2018 Annual review of diseases prioritized under the Research and Development Blueprint, February 2018 (PDF; 449 kB).
  11. Shawna Williams: Where Coronaviruses Come From (interview). In: The Scientist. January 24, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  12. Maryn Mckenna: How ProMED Crowdsourced the Arrival of Covid-19 and SARS. In: Wired . March 23, 2020, accessed April 22, 2020 .
  13. Explained (Table 2, Part 7: The Next Pandemic). In: IMDb. Retrieved April 22, 2020 .
  14. James Gorman: How do bats live with so many viruses? In: The New York Times . January 28, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  15. Karin Bruilliard: The next pandemic is already coming, unless humans change how we interact with wildlife, scientists say. In: Washington Post . April 3, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  16. Ebola, Dengue fever, Lyme disease: The growing economic cost of infectious diseases. In: National Science Foundation . December 16, 2014, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  17. COVID-19: Officials fear global outbreak of coronavirus. In: CBC News . February 24, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  18. ^ "Pure Baloney": Zoologist Debunks Trump's COVID-19 Origin Theory, Explains Animal-Human Transmission. In: Democracy Now . April 16, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020 .

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