Hendra, Dengue, Nipah - We Can Expect A New Wave Of Migratory Diseases, And We're Not Ready
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During this wild exodus, these animals are likely to bump into new animals and humans they have never crossed paths with before. Carlson, the Georgetown biologist, calls these events “meet cutes” — random encounters where viruses jump species and new diseases are often born. The vast majority of the new infectious diseases that have emerged in recent decades have come from these zoonotic pathogens, as they are called, with bats, mosquitoes, and ticks being among the most competent carriers of new viruses. When they jump to humans, we get pandemics like Covid-19. What’s next? “It’s really a roll of the dice,” says Raina Plowright, an epidemiologist at Montana State University who studies the emergence of new diseases. By one count, an estimated 1.7 million currently undiscovered viruses are thought to exist in mammal and avian hosts. Of these, more than 800,000 could have the ability to infect humans.
“We really need to be prepared — both from a public-health standpoint as well as from a scientific standpoint,” Fauci tells me. “The way we are now interacting on our planet with the environment?…?will have a great effect on vector-borne diseases [those carried by animals like mosquitoes and ticks]. We’ve just got to be prepared and [understand] that this is something of our own doing. Some of it we can reverse, some of it we can’t. [But] we’ve got to make sure we are aware that this will happen, and our preparedness has to be commensurate with that risk.” Right now, it is not. After four years of President Trump, public-health infrastructure has been gutted and trust in science undermined. Trump dismantled the pandemic response team created by Obama and moved to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO. Guidelines to control the pandemic from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most respected public-health agency in the world, have been ignored. Simple measures that can save countless lives, like wearing a mask, have been transformed into political statements. President-elect Biden has vowed a restoration, but the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are going to fight hard for their God-given right to believe in pseudo-science and quack cures. Viruses aren’t political, but our response to them is. If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we’re woefully unprepared for what’s coming.
In 1994, in the small town of Hendra, in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia, a number of racehorses at one of the stables in town started to get sick. No one knew why. The horses were disoriented, their faces swelled, a bloody froth poured out of their nostrils. One of them was seen banging its head against a concrete wall. Several horses collapsed and died. At about the same time, a man named Vic Rail, who worked at the stable, came down with what he thought was the flu. He ended up in intensive care, where his lungs filled up with fluid. Shortly afterward, he died. Six hundred miles north of Brisbane, another man who lived and worked on a horse farm got a mysterious illness, with seizures, convulsions, and brain swelling before dying 25 days after he was admitted to the hospital. Before the outbreaks ended, 70 horses were sick, and seven humans died who had been in close contact with dead or ill horses.
This story is important for two reasons. First, it’s a classic “spillover event,” and one that echoes the emergence of Covid-19, which likely originated in a horseshoe bat somewhere in southern China, northern Vietnam, or Laos. No one is sure exactly where and how the jump from bats to humans happened. The virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it first infected humans there. One hypothesis is that the virus made the leap to humans while someone was exploring a cave and came in contact with infected guano. That person, or perhaps someone they transmitted it to, then traveled to Wuhan, where the virus spread widely enough to be noticed. Another hypothesis is that the virus first jumped to an intermediate host, such as a pangolin, an armadillo-like creature prized in some Asian cultures for the delicacy and medicinal properties of its flesh. The pangolin was then sold at a wildlife market in Wuhan, where the virus jumped to humans. (The theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab has been thoroughly debunked.) “We may never know exactly where or how this virus first made the jump from bats to people,” says Plowright. It took 30 years of detective work to determine that HIV likely emerged in 1908 in Cameroon, during a bloody interaction between a human and a chimpanzee.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/climate-change-risks-infectious-diseases-covid-19-ebola-dengue-1098923/
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