While waiting for the Corona virus vaccines, which have relatively removed the specter of fear and panic among us, we forgot the origin of the virus and no longer asked about its origins and how it found a direct path for itself into our lungs and settlement among us. I have written and published many articles and research on the impact of the Corona epidemic on the economy, societies, public health, travel and communication between humans, not to mention the need to adapt and coexist with it.
Humanity has become addicted to the vaccine and oblivion together, while new studies indicate the possibility of new epidemics due to environmental degradation and the effects of the climate crisis. Next, the invention of vaccines is not the only way to get rid of epidemics, but rather the search for their origin and the reasons for their spread among humans must be sought.
Researchers in Climate Science and Emerging Diseases have found that 58% of the pathogens encountered by humanity worldwide have at some point been exacerbated by climate hazards.
Researchers expect that the climate crisis will cause 218 out of 375 human pathogens, while the proportion of pathogens that has been reduced by global warming emissions does not exceed 16%. The full extent of this risk, according to the newly released new study entitled: The climate crisis could exacerbate more than half of human pathogens, is still weak and highlights the urgent need to work and research the source of the problem.
The study indicates that there are a thousand unique transmission paths, in which climatic hazards and through different types of transmission led to the spread of human pathogens as a result of climatic hazards represented by warming, heat waves and droughts, forest fires, intense precipitation, sea level rise, and so on. The continuous emission of greenhouse gases contributes to the intensification of many climate risks to the Earth’s climate system, including the natural cover of the land and the ocean system, which is the main coolant of the planet’s weather, which leads to the exacerbation of pathogens.
There is no longer any doubt in the scientific and academic community about the contribution of greenhouse gas emissions to the exacerbation of climatic hazards to the Earth system. Since the effects of the climate crisis differ in different regions, shifts in the geographical range of species are one of the most common environmental indicators. For example, changes in warming and precipitation have been associated with the expansion of vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, birds, and many mammals implicated in outbreaks of viruses, bacteria, and animals, including dengue, chikungunya, plague, Lyme disease, Nile virus, Zika, trypanosomiasis, and echinococcosis. and malaria.
Climate-driven expansions of aquatic systems have also been observed, including cases of cholera, anisakiasis and poisoning by jellyfish.
Jellyfish were found in 2019 in the Iraqi marshes in the south of the country, although it is not a suitable environment for this marine species. Rather, the mixing of animal habitats as a result of the ascent of a salt tongue from the Gulf to fresh water, is what created a way to transport the jellyfish to an aquatic environment alien to it.
Warming in certain geographic areas, such as latitudes, contributes to the survival of vectors and pathogens even in winter, exacerbating outbreaks of many viruses such as Zika and dengue. Disturbances in animal habitats caused by warming, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, storms, floods, and land cover change have also been associated with bringing pathogens closer to human communities. For example, the repercussions of the Nipah virus and Ebola are related to wildlife and habitats of bats and rodents, as drought and drought push the population to search for limited food resources in areas that are considered a reservoir for carriers of pathogens. The vectors of these pathogens may find new habitats in humans in the wake of wildfires.
In this regard, it can be noted that the decrease in snow cover caused by global warming forced mice to find their habitat among humans, which led to the outbreak of hantavirus. The drought also contributed to the transmission of West Nile virus due to the gathering of mosquitoes and birds around the remaining water sources and basins. Floods and storms are remarkably and commonly associated with sewage overflow and direct transmission of pathogens, not to mention the emergence of other pathogens that are directly linked to the melting of rivers and glaciers, which are a reservoir of viruses frozen hundreds of thousands of years ago.
In this context, I quote an excerpt from a book by French archaeologist Jean-Paul Demul, published last year (2021), entitled: Prehistory. Regarding the reconstruction of prehistoric climates and environments, Demul writes, “Several ways make it possible to approach ancient climates and environments, particularly the study of animals and plants, always associated with particular climates. Animals can indeed be preserved in the form of fossilized bones, and plants in the form of pollen. , its highly resistant outer shell ensures its preservation for tens of thousands of years.In extremely favorable environments, plants can also be found intact in the mud, just as animals can be found in ice, as in Siberia, where the current melting may cause the disappearance of all These fossil animals in the long run, which represents a major scientific disaster, not to mention the health risks from the awakening of bacteria or viruses.
In addition to everything mentioned about the direct effects of the climate crisis on human health, environmental degradation resulting from agricultural activities, wild trade, exploitation of natural resources and wildlife, as they are a group of resources outside human society, and can be used indefinitely. Cities and modern life have been able to make humanity forget where food, drink and energy sources come from, and thus assumed the existence of an infinite nature in their giving, so they made the matter of depleting natural resources forgotten in their culture and lifestyle.
And at the moment when the outbreak of the Corona epidemic led to the closure of cities, and quarantine seemed to be a social option, subjective rather than governmental, daily needs brought people back to the question of how to obtain food in a world where they are ignorant of what is happening outside the city, and he also brought back images of farmers to the memory of city dwellers. . Hence the urgent need to search for the sources and origin of the virus and to cross the space between it and humans. From here, ecologists, emerging diseases and geographers began to ask about the city’s responsibility for what happened. Are epidemics a natural reaction to the expansion of urbanization, intensive agriculture and wildlife trade at the expense of the ecosystem?
A quick glance suffices to note the imbalance in ecosystems in favor of food and agricultural animals. While the population of the Earth today touches 8 billion people today, the number of agricultural animals, cows in particular, constitutes 20 percent of the animal biomass on the planet, farms occupy 30 percent of the areas that were part of the biodiversity in the past, and today threaten nearly 40 percent of wildlife and nature protected areas.
This is the conclusion of a report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2020. The report emphasized that 70 percent of emerging diseases such as Ebola, Zika and Nipah encephalitis, as well as known epidemics such as influenza, HIV ( AIDS) and COVID-19, are diseases caused by microbes of animal origin, that is, they are of zoonotic origin and spread as a result of contact between wild animals, livestock and humans. Mammals (especially bats, rodents and monkeys), some birds (waterfowl in particular), as well as livestock (such as pigs, camels and poultry), are reservoirs of pathogens that may lead to epidemics, according to the same report. It is believed that the number of undiscovered viruses carried by mammals and birds touches 1.7 million, and a large proportion of undiscovered viruses, numbering between 540 thousand and 850,000, have the ability to infect humans.
Next, the origin of epidemics is due to the various microbes and viruses carried by animals, but their transmission to humans and their emergence in the form of emerging diseases, driven entirely by human activities. The underlying causes of epidemics are the same as those related to global environmental degradation and the climate crisis as they lead to biodiversity loss. Taken together, these changes include land use, the expansion and intensification of agricultural practices, wildlife trade and consumption, rising temperatures, floods and wildfires.
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