How to Reduce the Risk of the Next Pandemic
Most emerging diseases come from human impacts on natural ecosystems
Welcome to the web version of Need to Know: Science & Insight, a newsletter on what we all Need-to-Know about climate impacts, energy transitions, the decline of nature’s support systems, living safely during a pandemic and more. It comes with an often funny personal story and some useful ideas. All in a 5 to 10 minute read in your inbox once or twice a week. It’s free. No ads. No spam.
Hello Friends,
This is a special issue of NtK. There’s an important piece of new research I thought you needed to know about: Pandemics are on the rise, what we can do to stop this. Normally I would have done an article for some media publication but prefer to communicate directly with you. — Stephen
Scientific evidence clearly shows pandemics are becoming more frequent. More pandemics are coming and likely to be worse than COVID-19 according to the newly formed Intergovernmental Council on Pandemic Prevention.
Ebola, Zika, Nipah encephalitis and almost all known pandemics (e.g. influenza, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19) are caused by microbes of animal origin. These microbes end up infecting people due to contact among wildlife, livestock, and people. The term for this is zoonosis and it’s well understood vector for diseases. For example the Nipah virus outbreak in 1999 occurred when intensive pig farming began on the habitat of infected fruit bats in Malaysia.
We live in a virus-filled world
The bats aren’t to blame for Nipah or for COVID-19. First of all there are way more viruses on the Earth than stars in the universe. They’re literally everywhere even kilometers deep below ground. All animals, including humans, have a bunch some viruses floating around inside. One estimate suggests every mammal, including humans, have 58 different viruses inside them without causing disease.
I’m not going to get into viruses here, other to say that human immune system can handle most of the viruses we’re exposed to. The Need-to-Know is that trouble begins when we’re exposed to a new-to-you-and-me virus. That’s what the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is that’s causing the COVID-19 disease. [If you really want to dig into virus science check out this terrific podcast “This Week in Virology” -- lots of great resources.]
As we’ve learned the hard way, coping with pandemics is extremely difficult — and expensive: COVID-19 costs are estimated to be at least $16 trillion globally so far. And by end of next year that’s what it may cost the United States alone. So while we struggle through this pandemic, how we do we prevent future pandemics?
How to prevent future pandemics
A number of new studies have looked at this very topic. The most recent was released yesterday by the Intergovernmental Council on Pandemic Prevention. [Executive Summary] Here’s how Peter Daszak, the Chair of the Council, summed up the causes of pandemics:
The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment.
Changes in the way we use land; the expansion and intensification of agriculture; and unsustainable trade, production and consumption disrupt nature and increase contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and people. This is the path to pandemics.
Lowering risks of future pandemics requires reducing human activities that drive the loss of biodiversity such as halting expansion of agriculture and industrial activities like mining and other resource extraction into natural areas. We’ll need greater conservation of protected areas, and changes in our consumption patterns. The obvious one is reduction in meat consumption. The Council proposes “taxes or levies on meat consumption, livestock production and other forms of high pandemic-risk activities”.
They also recommend eliminating trade in wildlife with high disease-risk and greatly enhanced law enforcement to crack down on all aspects of the illegal wildlife trade.
Governments at all levels will need to incorporate pandemic and emerging disease risk health impact assessments for any major development and land-use projects that might affect natural areas.
An inescapable Need-to-Know is that what we consume, what we buy, is largely behind the expansion into natural areas that’s putting all of us at greater risk of future pandemics.
Another study published in July estimated that if nations took eight somewhat similar pandemic prevention measures, the total annual cost would range between $18 billion and $27 billion. Aside from protecting humanity from another devastating disease, these measures would have a number of co-benefits including reducing carbon emissions and the loss of wildlife while providing better protection for humanity’s life support system.
In a previous issue of Need to Know I quoted Sandra Díaz an ecologist and co-chair of a multi-year global assessment of the health of world’s ecosystems:
“The evidence is crystal clear: Nature is in trouble. Therefore we are in trouble.”
She said that more than 18 months ago. The question now is what are we going to do about the trouble we’re in? I offered these two suggestions in that NtK issue:
Stop doing dumb things - eliminate harmful subsidies for the fossil fuel, fishing, agriculture, and transportation industries
Stop buying stuff, especially cheap stuff — everything we buy has an ecological cost — another need-to-know.
There’s more on this in “An Extinction Crisis Solution: Stop Doing Dumb Things”.
That’s it for this special issue of Need-to-Know, I hope you’ll share it widely so we can work together to prevent the next pandemic.
Until next time, stay safe.
Stephen