Climate Change + Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease (ProPublica)

[OneGrassRoot]

How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease

The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.

Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed. A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.

The diseases may have always been there, buried deep in wild and remote places out of reach of people. But until now, the planet’s natural defense systems were better at fighting them off.

Today, climate warming is demolishing those defense systems, driving a catastrophic loss in biodiversity that, when coupled with reckless deforestation and aggressive conversion of wildland for economic development, pushes farms and people closer to the wild and opens the gates for the spread of disease.

https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-infectious-diseases

[PETRUS]

1. kick

The issue of ecological overshoot should be at the forefront of our political conversations.

[crickets]

2. K&R for visibility.