While some animal-transmitted diseases of the poor are declining, other, mostly foodborne, diseases are on the rise

African clay pots (via the Dick Jemison Tribal Arts Collection).

‘. . . Around 70 percent of all infectious diseases are zoonotic, moving from animals—usually livestock—to humans, through either contact or the consumption of animal products and by-products. The International Livestock Research Institute estimates that 2.7 million people die from zoonotic diseases each year, while approximately 2.5 billion people get sick. To offer some sense of scale, a recent study led by Lawrence Summers, former treasury secretary and former director of the National Economic Council at the White House, estimated that the costs of pandemic diseases—nearly all of which begin in animals—fall in the same range as those expected by climate change-related disasters.

‘”And yet only 4.5 percent of development money, of aid, goes to agriculture,” Carel du Marchie Sarvaas, executive director of the International Federation for Animal Health—the global trade association for leading animal pharmaceutical…