Mary Harris: A Warning From a Scientist Who Saw the Coronavirus Coming // Coronavirus: nine reasons to be reassured
It’s our everyday way
of going about business on the planet that seems to be driving this...I would say we are
the cause of almost all emerging diseases — Peter Daszak
NB: Comment by a friend who read this article: Excellent interview
which very rightly points to the propensity of present-day organised human
systems to indiscriminately invade and destabilise the earth’s myriad
ecosystems. What it also needed to talk about was the equally, if not
more, important propensity of interfering with, and reconfiguring, ecosystems.
For instance, to take just one example, industrialising cattle domestication.
There are today over 1.5 billion industrially bred and raised cows to produce
milk and meat — that also fart around 250 litres of methane each every
day, which, while it accounts for "only" 15% of greenhouse gases
globally, is almost 30 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2 (the
quantitatively most important greenhouse gas). And let’s not even start talking
about the genetic manipulations and promiscuous raising of livestock, an
ecosystems reconfiguration which has already caused massive pubic health
problems through mad-cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease — and swine flu. As a
matter of fact, COVID-19 is just another variant of H1N1 swine flu, and SARS,
with similar origins in industrial pig breeding.
Peter Daszak is a
zoologist who works in China and runs the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization
that studies the connections between human and wildlife health. So
coronaviruses, like the new one that’s spreading right now, are one of his
areas of expertise. A few years back, Daszak was working with the World Health
Organization, plotting out what the next global pandemic could look like, when
he and some other scientists came up with the idea of “Disease X.”
Disease X
would hit this epidemiological sweet spot: It would transmit easily from person
to person, and it would be deadly, but not too deadly. Even
though scientists like him knew this sort of virus was coming, the world didn’t
get ready, not soon enough. And Daszak says that even when this outbreak is
contained, it won’t be the last one. We’re going to get bigger pandemics, and
they’re going to happen more often. But if we pay close attention to what’s
happening right now, next time could be different.
I spoke to Daszak
on Wednesday’s
episode of What Next about COVID-19, the cause, our response, and what
comes next. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: Tens
of thousands of people have been diagnosed with this disease worldwide, with
more than 3,000 deaths. Yet there have been few deaths in the U.S. so far. Do
we actually know how many cases are stateside? It’s been reported that we’re
not testing that much, but that might change soon.
Peter Daszak: In most outbreaks, you never really know
when it begins, what the true caseload is, what the environment is. All you can
see are the people who come to the hospital and get tested and diagnosed. You
don’t see people with mild infections, or people who are pretty sick in poor
communities and just don’t make it, or people in communities that have trouble
traveling. When people start
rolling out those test kits, we’re going to find a lot of cases in the U.S. and
it’s going to look like this is spreading out of control. The truth is: It’s
probably already been there, probably, and we’re now finding that out.
You know how this
story goes. First there’s the panic, the search for something or someone to
blame. In the case of the novel coronavirus, there was the story that the
outbreak got its start at a local food market in Wuhan. But stories like that
can get in the way of the bigger picture: More and more people are also living
and working closer to wildlife. It isn’t about one or two individuals
putting people at risk. The risk also comes from clear-cutting rainforests,
remote mining, and even widespread suburbanization.
I would say we are the
cause of almost all emerging diseases.
What do you mean
when you say that?
We’re not doing it on
purpose, but it’s our everyday way of going about business on the planet that
seems to be driving this... read more:
