Posted on 4/29/2022 5:56 AM / updated 4/29/2022 5:57 AM
(Credit: Carlos Fabal/AFP)
The worsening of the greenhouse effect, deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation contributing to the Earth’s abnormal rise in temperature could lead to a chaotic scenario for global health: climate change could trigger the next pandemic.
This is because changing seasons, warming of the deserts and the South and North Poles, and deforestation will force animals of these habitats to move to places with large human populations and may cause the transmission of new viruses, such as novel coronavirus that caused the Covid19 pandemic in China as of December 2019.
The link between climate change and virus transmission was analyzed and described by scientists at Georgetown University in a study published this Thursday (April 28) in the science journal Nature. The researchers’ discovery is that when animals migrate to other places, “thousands of viruses” are shared with other mammals, thus facilitating transmission to humans as well.
For the scientists, “the changes present greater opportunities for viruses like Ebola or coronaviruses to emerge in new areas, making them more difficult to track and making it easier for viruses in new animal species to move away from a ‘jump’ species. for the people”.
Experts explain that until now only an analogy between forced habitat changes of animals due to wildlife trade would represent this risk. However, a much greater possibility is now seen in the forced migration of wild animals to other geographic regions.
“Markets are important to us because bringing unhealthy animals together in unnatural combinations creates opportunities for this gradual emergence process like SARS passed from bats to civets (small nocturnal mammals found in Africa and Asia) and then from civets to humans,” recalled Colin Carlson, lead author of the study and research assistant professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center.
“But markets are no longer an isolated risk; in a changing climate, such processes will be a reality almost everywhere in nature,” warned the researcher. Therefore, the study predicts that climate change will become the biggest risk factor for disease emergence, surpassing even the most visible problems today when it comes to the environment: deforestation, wildlife trade and industrial agriculture.
“This mechanism adds another layer to the threat to human and animal health from climate change,” says study colead author Gregory Albery, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at Georgetown University.
The researchers warn that much of this process of habitat migration is already underway as the world is 1.2 degrees warmer and “efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may not prevent these events.”
“The Covid19 pandemic and the earlier spread of SARS, Ebola and Zika show how a virus that jumps from animals to humans can have a massive impact. To predict its jump to humans, we need to know something about its distribution among other animals,” said Sam Scheiner, program director at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the research.
“This research shows how animal movements and interactions due to climate warming can increase the number of viruses that switch between species,” he adds.
According to the study, bats will be the most affected animals. Animals account for the majority of viral fractions. “Their ability to fly will allow them to fly long distances and share most viruses. Because of its pivotal role in virus emergence, the greatest impacts are predicted to be in Southeast Asia, a global hotspot for bat diversity.
The authors say the solution is to combine wildlife disease surveillance with realtime studies of environmental changes.
“If a freetailed Brazilian bat arrives in the Appalachian Mountains, we should invest in knowing what viruses are approaching,” says Carlson. “Trying to identify these hosts in realtime is the only way to prevent this process from leading to more spillovers and more pandemics.”
“We are closer than ever to predicting and preventing the next pandemic,” says Carlson. “This is a big step towards prediction now we have to start working on the harder half of the problem,” concludes Carlson.