With the Zika virus looming just a couple of years after Ebola spread across West Africa, what’s long been obvious to experts should now be clear to the rest of us: We live in an era of emerging pathogens. Between 1940 and 2004, more than 300 infectious diseases either emerged or spread into new places and populations.
On Friday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott called a news conference to alert the public to four cases of Zika in South Florida transmitted locally by mosquitoes. Though we imagine infectious microbes propagating according to their own logic, many are re-surging thanks to the unintended consequences of human activity that would seem to have little to do with the biology of microbes, from economics and housing policy to architecture.
