Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases pose some of the greatest health risks to human populations worldwide. Increasingly they are a feature of our time, stoked by changes in human demographics, mobility, land use and climate, and compounded by poor standards of public health in parts of the world [26, 41] . Importantly, new surveillance and intervention strategies are now becoming possible, guided by quantitative interpretation of epidemiological data, potentially strengthening the hand of primary prevention efforts.