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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: 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.