Definition: According to a report by the Institute of Medicine (USA), emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are diseases of infectious origin whose incidence in humans has increased within the past two decades or threatens to increase in the future. The maps opposite show the spatial distribution of the predicted relative risk of various categories of emerging infectious disease (EID) events, with green representing lower risk of an EID and red higher risk. The maps are based on an analysis of 335 EID events identified between 1940 and 2004, and the distribution of selected ‘drivers’ of EID events, such as population growth, latitude, and the richness of wildlife species. For this analysis an EID event was defined as ‘the first temporal emergence of a pathogen in a human population which was related to the increase in distribution, increase in incidence, or increase in virulence or other factors that led to that pathogen being classed as an emerging disease’. The maps have been corrected for geographical reporting bias by adjusting for the frequency of the country listed for the affiliation of authors in each article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases from 1973 to 2004.
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