As the author suggests, not much the individual can do towards changing the inevitable...

There seems to be a increase in the number of people, children too, shown kissing animals and even sharing saliva with all sorts of animals, but especially dogs, cats and horses.

Most realise that veterinarians are not going to be opposed to that and even optimistic that problems might not eventuate if your pet goes to the vet often. Encouraging owners to treat animals as part of the family is a deliberate and highly effective strategy to grow fees and profits. Your risk, their profit.

And this guy is a retired professor at Macquarie. What Prof Curson says is all true up to a point, but he omits many salient points. For example, he mentions the death toll from the 1918-19 flu pandemic. Quite so. He then needs to ask himself why the death toll was so high. The answer is that it occurred directly after WWI when whole populations were on the brink of starvation, particularly in the Central Powers, and had been weakened by the privations of war. Health services were strained and millions were moving around. If a flu strain of the same degree of danger hit now would it cause the same number of deaths? In fact, it is unlikely the death rate would change much at all. Even in areas directly affected by Ebola it is possible that death rates from infectious diseases fell, not rose (I had cause to look at what figures there were for the area, recently). After all, Ebola is not the only deadly disease in the area by a long way, and international organisations have been doing a lot of work in the area. In western countries, as Prof Curson should well know, death rates from infectious diseases of all kinds have been falling not rising for decades.

//There seems to be a increase in the number of people, children too, shown kissing animals and even sharing saliva with all sorts of animals, but especially dogs, cats and horses.//

Jesus, you must watch some weird videos.

Zoonotic diseases which readily spread between people and domesticated animals are already well controlled, because medical and veterinary science were not properly developed until long after the domestication of those animals. The two fields are fundamentally intertwined. It was zoonotic disease that led to Jenner discovering vaccination in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner

And much of Pasteur's work deals with zoonotic and purely veterinarian disease.

Long story short: the next great pandemic will probably not have natural reservoir in any domesticated species.

The smart money is on whale flu, apparently.

" number of people, children too, shown kissing animals and even sharing saliva " or 'has the cat got your tongue' in war-torn slums.
Chinese aerial virus is infecting trade deals and tweeting sites in the New York swamps.

When poverty becomes the new norm for more than half the population, then standards of hygiene and vermin control go AWOL. As does adequate nutrition.

And health services are less than adequate, with too many sick folk crammed into wards that out be divided into single ensuited rooms. To limit the spread of super bugs. We need to return to he sterile medical practise pre antibiotics.

Moreover, things like HIV/aids can and does mutate and needs new additional medications to control this virus. As long as big pharma earns annual billions from managing, there will remain little appetite for curing this scourge.

Even as already approved medication (leukaemia chemo/rheumatoid arthritis?) can in combination, stop this virus dead in its tracks? And we need to make better use of both ozone and oxygen as pathogen/disease control mechanisms.

At the end of the day, unless we remove disadvantage and its handmaiden poverty! Things can only ever go from bad to worse, given none of the alluded to problems happen in isolation without knowable causative factors and their obvious solutions.

The worse being unmitigated greed on part of the population and just can't envision a future, where there's enough, so that we just don't have have deliberately created pools of poverty!
Alan B.