Stopping deforestation can prevent pandemics

Source(s): Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

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Three quarters of the emerging pathogens that infect humans leaped from animals, many of them creatures in the forest habitats that we are slashing and burning to create land for crops, including biofuel plants, and for mining and housing. The more we clear, the more we come into contact with wildlife that carries microbes well suited to kill us—and the more we concentrate those animals in smaller areas where they can swap infectious microbes, raising the chances of novel strains. 

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Stopping deforestation will not only reduce our exposure to new disasters but also tamp down the spread of a long list of other vicious diseases that have come from rain forest habitats—Zika, Nipah, malaria, cholera and HIV among them. A 2019 study found that a 10 percent increase in deforestation would raise malaria cases by 3.3 percent; that would be 7.4 million people worldwide.

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As we implement these solutions, we can also find new outbreaks earlier. Epidemiologists want to tiptoe into wild habitats and test mammals known to carry coronaviruses—bats, rodents, badgers, civets, pangolins and monkeys—to map how the germs are moving. Public health officials could then test nearby humans. To be effective, though, this surveillance must be widespread and well funded. In September 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic began, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced it would end funding for PREDICT, a 10-year effort to hunt for threatening microbes that found more than 1,100 unique viruses. 

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In the meantime, governments should prohibit the sale of live wild animals in so-called wet markets, where pathogens have repeatedly crossed over into humans. The markets may be culturally important, but the risk is too great. Governments must also crack down on illegal wildlife trade, which can spread infectious agents far and wide. In addition, we have to examine factory farms that pack thousands of animals together—the source of the 2009 swine flu outbreak that killed more than 10,000 people in the U.S. and multitudes worldwide.

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