![]() Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are able to spread quickly to new places. Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases such as Ebola, Sars, bird flu and now Covid-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. “We cut the trees we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. “We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today? In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections between the wellbeing of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems. Photograph: National Institutes of Health/AFP via Getty Imagesīut a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise – with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. ![]() On the virus model (behind), the virus surface (blue) is covered with spike proteins (red) that enable the virus to enter and infect human cells. Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harbouring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans such as Ebola, HIV and dengue.Ī 3D print of a spike protein and a Covid-19 virus particle. “We used to love the forest, now we fear it,” he told me. Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed the chimp. ![]() There, I found traumatised people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90% of the people it infects, would return. ![]() It took a day by canoe and then many hours along degraded forest logging roads, passing Baka villages and a small goldmine, to reach the village. I travelled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity “hotspots” such as tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities. ![]()
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