Is Nipah virus a threat to global security?

Abstract:

Nipah virus lives in large fruit bats in South and Southeast Asia. When people become infected with Nipah virus over half of them die. Nipah virus can also be transmitted from person to person. This talk will describe how this bat virus occasionally infects human populations and causes outbreaks through person-to-person transmission. It will explore the risk of a global pandemic of Nipah virus and consider appropriate policy responses.

Speaker bio:

Stephen Luby is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine; Deputy Director for Research at the Center for Global Health Innovation; Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Dr. Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. Dr. Luby earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Luby's former positions include leading the Epidemiology Unit of the Community Health Sciences Department at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan for 5 years and working as a Medical Epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exploring causes and prevention of diarrheal disease in settings where diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death.  Immediately prior to his current appointment, Dr. Luby served for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), where he directed the Centre for Communicable Diseases. Dr. Luby was seconded from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and was the Country Director for CDC in Bangladesh.

Dr. Luby's research has focused on clarifying the burden of several communicable diseases in low income countries and developing and evaluating practical strategies to mitigate their impact. He is currently exploring circumstances where economic and political forces encourage environmental degradation that exerts substantial disease burden in low income countries, with a view to developing and evaluating interventions.