Climate change may make pandemics like COVID-19 much more common:
The likelihood of an extreme epidemic, or one similar to COVID-19, will increase threefold in the coming decades, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers used data from epidemics from the past 400 years, specifically death rates, length of previous epidemics and the rate of new infectious diseases. Their calculation is a sophisticated prediction based on known risks and can be a useful guide for policy makers and public health officials.
They also found that the probability of a person experiencing a pandemic like COVID-19 in one's lifetime is around 38%. The researchers said this could double in years to come.
[...] Zoonotic diseases are caused by germs that spread between animals and people. Animals can carry viruses and bacteria that humans can encounter directly, through contact, or indirectly, through things like soil or water supply, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"As you make that interface between humans and the natural world smaller, we just come in more contact with those things and climate enhances the ability for viruses to infect us more easily," said Pan. He said our risk for any zoonotic or emerging viral infections is going to rise over time.
[...] "We can't deal with pandemics with Band-Aids. Meaning after waiting until diseases show up, and then trying to figure out how to solve them," said Bernstein.
Added Pan: "Globally, if we want to prevent another major pandemic from completely disrupting our society, we need to start investing heavily and sharing information across countries on surveillance of different viral infections. There's some places in the world where we don't even have the basic capacity to evaluate or test strains, viral fevers coming into hospitals. And so a lot of those things go unchecked until it's too late."
Preventing these diseases not only requires global collaboration, but attention to the source of the problem.
"We need to address spillover. And that means we need to protect habitats. We need to tackle climate change. We need to address the risk of large-scale livestock production because a lot of the pathogens move from wild animals into livestock and then into people," said Bernstein.
Global spending on COVID vaccines is projected to reach $157 billion, according to Reuters. Annual spending on forest conservation is much less.
"We're about to throw a whole lot of money at solutions that only address a fraction of the problem. We get very little back relative to what we could get back for $1 spent on post spillover intervention versus root cause prevention," said Bernstein.
Journal Reference:
Marco Marani et al., Intensity and frequency of extreme novel epidemics [open], PNAS, 118 (35), 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105482118
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jb on Friday September 16 2022, @04:12AM (2 children)
Given that for everyone alive today the probability is 100% (since we've all lived through it), "could double" sounds like somewhat of an understatement.
When "researchers" don't even understand basic probability, one has to wonder what else they got wrong...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2022, @01:26PM
You realize you're reading a news story, not a research paper, right, dumb-ass?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @04:49AM
> one has to wonder what else they got wrong...
You don't exactly need a PhD to understand as you add more humans, we are eventually going to be living in human filth. If not 10B then 20B. There's a number where it's humans everywhere, all the time, the smell, the talk, the diseases, everywhere. Nature enjoys this kind of situation - she gets to try out some new ideas.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 16 2022, @06:38AM (8 children)
Humanity has had an especially good ~200 years, health wise. The past ~75 years even better than the previous years. Polio and smallpox have been virtually eliminated in the US, throughout Europe, and most other civilized countries. There are a few holdouts in some less-than-civilized countries, and a few trouble spots in places like India. Dozens of other diseases have been beaten down, if not eliminated. Malaria is probably the most widespread disease that claims the most lives left today - and even that can be held at bay with proper techniques.
Covid19 has put a real scare into people who have entirely forgotten how life used to be. Remember big families? A mother might have 8, 12, or more children, and only 2 to 4 reach adulthood? I'm talking about right here in the USA, and probably Europe as well. Less than 100 years ago, polio was crippling or killing children every year. Just a wee bit over 100 years ago, a flu bug killed millions of people. And, that is how life has been since time immemorial.
I see only a return to life as our great-greats knew it. At no other time in history have parents been so sure that their children would live to adulthood. War, poverty, famine, and plague were the norms in most times.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 16 2022, @11:00AM (3 children)
Why? Are we going to forget how to fight disease? Well, the smart ones anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2022, @01:30PM
I keep hearing that man is the disease.
(Score: 4, Informative) by deimtee on Friday September 16 2022, @02:55PM (1 child)
Not so much forget, as it stops working. More and more bacterial diseases are getting antibiotic resistant. There aren't really any effective viral treatments, most treatment is to support the patient until their immune system beats it or they die.
Combine that with much higher stranger contact levels. Someone in a small town 200 hundred years ago hardly ever saw a stranger and if everyone in the next town got sick no-one went there. Now a contagious disease can spread around the world in days not years. The isolation has gone away. Even with all the covid masks and spacing and hand gel, we still have a much more connected world where diseases have hugely larger population to evolve in and adapt to.
Basically, we had a short run where we had a new environment created by effective anti-bacterials and some vaccines that targeted the worst of the viruses. Now, evolution is catching up and the bugs are adapting to the new paradigm.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 16 2022, @11:02PM
+1 informative, and it should be +5.
We have stories aplenty of "superbugs" in hospitals, and diseases that no longer respond to antibiotics. Even without those stories, the current scary bug should be a wakeup call. It seems that some people believe throwing a lot of money at a problem should solve the problem.
Germ warfare has been raging since before the first mammal drew it's first breath. And, there are no guarantees that mammals will ultimately win. A bit of stupidity, compounded with some bad luck, and an all-new strategy from a new superbug, and humanity could be devastated.
(Score: 2) by helel on Friday September 16 2022, @04:04PM (1 child)
80% dead kids is just republican fan fiction. In the real world childhood mortality has rarely surpassed 50%.
As for whether or not we return to "historical norms," that's a choice we get to make. We can decide if we want well funded health care that treats everyone and can stop plagues before they get out of hand or if we'd rather allow pestilence to rip through the population. We get to choose if we want all children to receive enough nutrition to build a strong immune system or if we'd rather a world where large populations of a starving underclass serve as incubators for the next pandemic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @04:53AM
I think you'll find we prefer not to talk about "dirty" things like procreation and zygotes. We like to dress it up in Disneyland-level stories about Good Witches and Knights in Shining Golden Hair Pieces.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday September 16 2022, @05:06PM (1 child)
According to the family tree that one of my dad's cousin's wife compiled, my great-great-grandfather had 20 children (3 sets of twins), 17 surviving past childhood. Family reunions are quite busy I have to say.
Continuing the course that the sociopaths of the world want to take will practically guarantee that. Human greed and stupidity will ensure that we as a species will do nothing about it.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @05:11AM
In the grand scheme, human civilization was just the precursor for the next thing. A thin plastic layer in the geologic record - much like Iridium or the O2 catastrophe. Weird creates 1B years from now will be perplexed at all the piles of radioactive crud and a few rare odd plastics.
(Score: 4, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 16 2022, @11:56AM (1 child)
Trade with china may make pandemics like coronavirus much more common.
The media doesn't point out that obvious fact, because it would be muh racist, but we have known for decades that the PRC is a disease factory. That is so well established fact that it was in every biology textbook from junior high school on: China is a breeding grind for pandemics because of how Chinese live in close proximity with livestock and how they farm. If you look up the names of flu shots they issue every year the variants are always called "Shanghai 5b" or some such. They are never called "Nairobi red" or "Manila 7-c."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @05:16AM
Or you could just take the vaccine. Really we don't care about mind controlling you - I mean, c'mon. Your mind? Fuck. There's 1 million Mexicans with 25+ IQ points on you begging to clean houses. If brains were the target, I think vaccine mind control of the most idiotic 43% of the population would be a low priority for Joe Biden.
(Score: 5, Informative) by khallow on Friday September 16 2022, @12:54PM
And several by a Dr. Aaron Bernstein who has nothing to do with this research:
[...]
Notice how we went from a paper with rational discussion to yet another scare piece about climate change: paper -> researcher mentions "climate" to journalist -> journalist goes to a source who will gleefully link this to climate change -> ridiculous, unsubstantiated title and lurid prose.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Swervin on Friday September 16 2022, @01:39PM (1 child)
Reducing travel would probably help on both counts. Slow disease spread, waste less energy on international vacations. Plenty of stuff to see and do locally if people look, just not as easy to impress the social media crowd with how much you spent getting there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @05:55AM
Cool bro, looks like you really thought about it. Thanks man. If you don't mind, I'll go with the ones who dedicated their lives to science, and truth, and spent years in the lab and in textbooks trying to understand transmission vectors. But your shit is legit too, I mean, it's good shit brah, for someone else.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Entropy on Saturday September 17 2022, @07:00AM
They make climate change in Chinese viral labs?