The Guardian discusses how the ‘Promiscuous treatment of nature’ will lead to more pandemics. Habitat destruction forces wildlife into human environments, where new diseases flourish. Humanity’s “promiscuous treatment of nature” needs to change or there will be more deadly pandemics such as Covid-19, warn scientists who have analysed the link between viruses, wildlife and habitat destruction. Deforestation and other forms of land conversion are driving exotic species out of their evolutionary niches and into manmade environments, where they interact and breed new strains of disease, the experts say. Three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it is human activity that multiplies the risks of contagion.
In a soon-to-be-published paper in Frontiers in Medicine, Frutos and his co-authors argue the key to containing future epidemics is not to fear the wild, but to recognise that human activities are responsible for the emergence and propagation of the zoonosis. “The focus must be on these human activities because they can be properly organised,” notes the paper titled, the Conjunction of Events Leading to the Pandemic and Lessons to Learn for Future Threats.
Environmental Health News discusses how COVID-19 and the climate crisis are intertwined threats to Native Americans and the Earth. Just as these problems are linked, so are the solutions.