Josh Blake
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joshuablake.co.uk
Josh Blake
@joshuablake.co.uk
88 followers 230 following 47 posts
Professionally: civil servant, science advice for emergencies, previously infectious disease statistics PhD
Interests: Effective Altruism, politics, nerds
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I do sometimes wonder if we're looking in the wrong places.

1. This paper (screenshotted) suggesting that purely zoonotic (no h2h transmission) don't become epidemic, it's the ones with small outbreaks that do.
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

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Paper screenshot with text: "The phylogenetic pattern is consistent with epidemiological experience of human RNA viruses going back over 100 yr. There have been multiple examples of the emergence of new human-transmissible viruses from nonhuman reservoirs (including HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2) and several examples of outbreak (L3 by definition) viruses becoming epidemic (L4) viruses (including Ebola virus and Chikungunya virus). In contrast, there have been no clear examples of strictly zoonotic (L2) viruses becoming human transmissible (though the possibility has been raised as a concern, especially for the avian influenzas; Woolhouse et al. 2016)."
December 30, 2024 at 8:46 AM