By partnering with existing structures such as the IAEH and its journal, EcoHealth, and with communities of practice in Ecohealth around the world, individuals who identify with the One Health movement gain new platforms for interaction and outreach.
Epstein, a veterinarian with the EcoHealth Alliance, which is helping Bangladesh track the virus.
"They're mostly wing," said Kevin J. Olival, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance.
In recent years, researchers from EcoHealth Alliance have traveled across Bangladesh to survey the bat population for the virus.
The illegal wildlife trade, valued at as much as $20 billion a year, is second only to the drug trade in terms of its worth, according to EcoHealth.
Diseases in other mammals pose the biggest threat to humans of all wildlife ailments, said Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth.
A longtime conservationist, Mr. O'Donnell is on the board of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization whose goals include protecting endangered species and preserving ecosystems.
Health and economies both depend on well-managed natural resources and healthy ecosystems," Dominique Charron, programme leader of the Ecohealth programme initiative at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), told me.
All in all, the knowledge gained in the last couple of years about emerging diseases should allow us to sleep a little easier, says Dr. Epstein, the EcoHealth veterinarian.
"If you conserve an ecosystem you have a jolly good chance of conserving human health as well," said Simon Anthony, a molecular virologist with EcoHealth who is studying the ecology of Nipah and other viruses.
The study was led by Shi Zheng-Li, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Peter Daszak, of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York.
