Over the weekend, we finally got the chance to sit down with this long read from The New York Times about our growing zoonotic disease problem—and what we can do about it.
“Between 60 and 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases in humans come from other animals,”says The New York Times, including familiar diseases (rabies, Lyme, SARS, Ebola, West Nile, Zika, COVID-19) as well as some you might not know, like Q fever, orf, Rift Valley fever, and Kyasanur Forest disease.
And here’s the thing: “Zoonotic pathogens do not typically seek us out nor do they stumble onto us by pure coincidence. When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely.”
And the problem is getting worse—primarily due to massive population growth and wildlife trade.
This is good writing: “[T]he frequency and severity of zoonotic outbreaks in human populations cannot be explained by chance alone. We have linked the reservoirs of unfamiliar pathogens to our own through vast networks of accidental tributaries. We plunge our nets into the native pools of exotic creatures and fling what we catch into once impossible congregations, allowing their microbes to mingle and mutate. We fill our hinterlands with artificial oceans of pigs and poultry, which become mixing vessels for viruses from humans, livestock and wildlife. We drain the world’s biological basins of the diversity that would ordinarily keep contagions in check. Other animals’ diseases have not so much leapt onto us as flowed into us through channels we supplied.”
What they’re saying: “We need to stop looking at people in a vacuum,” said Jonathan Epstein, VP for Science and Outreach at the EcoHealth Alliance. “Everything we do to disrupt natural systems, to manipulate the environment around us, influences our own health. We haven’t thought about that carefully enough.”
So, what can we do? For starters, we can enact One Health policies to explore the links between human, animal, and environmental health—helping us understand this pandemic and the next one. The bipartisan One Health legislation on the table would be a good place to start.
Read the whole thing to learn about lesser-known zoonotic diseases, why bats are common vectors, and whether it’s possible to eliminate zoonotic diseases entirely. (Spoiler: It’s not—yet another reason why we need One Health.)
More Agriculture and Environment News:
POLITICO Pro: U.S. food exporters balk at China demand for coronavirus-free pledge
“U.S. food exporters are balking at a request from China to assure their products are free from the novel coronavirus after the Asian nation suspended chicken imports from an Alabama plant and asked some foreign trading partners to pledge their products are safe.”