The Next Pandemic will
likely come from wildlife
 |
| Ebola virus - early stage |
From: David
Quammen, Yale
Environment360 on ENN.com
Experts believe the next deadly human pandemic will almost certainly be a virus that spills over from wildlife to humans. The reasons why have a lot to do with the frenetic pace with which we are destroying wild places and disrupting ecosystems.
Emerging diseases are in
the news again. Scary viruses are making themselves noticed and felt. There's
been a lot of that during the past several months — West Nile fever kills 17
people in the Dallas area, three tourists succumb to hantavirus after visiting
Yosemite National Park, an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo claims 33 lives.
A separate Ebola
outbreak, across the border in Uganda, registers a death toll of 17. A peculiar
new coronavirus, related to SARS, proves fatal for a Saudi man and puts a
Qatari into critical condition, while disease scientists all over the world
wonder: Is this one — or is that one — going to turn into the Next Big One?
By the Next Big One, I
mean a murderous pandemic that sweeps around the planet, killing millions of
people, as the so-called "Spanish" influenza did in 1918-19, as AIDS
has been doing in slower motion, and as SARS might have done in 2003 if it
hadn't been stopped by fast science, rigorous
Experts I've interviewed
over the past six years generally agree that such a Next Big One is not only
possible but probable.
They agree that it will
almost certainly be a zoonotic disease — one that emerges from wildlife — and
that the causal agent will most likely be a virus. They agree that sheer human
abundance, density, and interconnectedness make us highly vulnerable.
Our population now
stands above seven billion, after all, a vast multitude of potential victims,
many of us living at close quarters in big cities, traveling quickly and often
from place to place, sharing infections with one another; and there are
dangerous new viruses lately emerging against which we haven’t been immunized.
Another major pandemic
seems as logically inevitable as the prospect that a very dry, very thick
forest will eventually burn.
Read more at Yale Environment360.
