Why Killer Viruses Are On The Rise: Environmental Changes By Humans; Rain Forests, Animals, Viruses
Last edited Thu Jan 23, 2020, 09:51 AM - Edit history (1)
- 'Why Killer Viruses Are On The Rise,' NPR, February 14, *2017.
- "By 2050, more than half of the world's population is projected to live in the tropics and subtropics, Han says. Right now, only 15 percent of the world's rain forests is still intact. The rest has been burned flat. Broken into pieces. Or converted into farms, ranges for cattle, metal mines — even shopping malls." -
- "Wild animals are now refugees. They have no home. So they come live in our backyards. They pee on our crops. Share our parks and playgrounds. Giving their viruses a chance to jump into us and make us sick. "So it's really the human impact on the environment that's causing these viruses to jump into people," Olival says. And cause an outbreak? I ask. Or a pandemic, says Olival." -
- Once called the "Dutchmen" because of their large noses and large bellies, proboscis monkeys live only in Borneo. Ecosystems that have a lot of diverse animals, like this monkey, also tend to have a lot of diverse viruses.
- Map showing the location of Borneo
Pygmy elephants. Monkeys with noses the size of beer cans. And a deer so small you could cradle it like a baby. And right there, sitting on a leaf, is the strangest bug we've ever seen. "Check out the size of it," says virus hunter Kevin Olival as he picks up a ginormous roly-poly. "It's the size of a ping-pong ball!" We're in the middle of Malaysia's Borneo rain forest.
Olival has brought us here because this is the type of place where pandemics are born. HIV came from a rain forest. So did Ebola. Yellow fever. And Zika.
The next troubling outbreak could come from a rain forest like this. And a big reason why: all the crazy animals that live here. Rain forests are the world's secret laboratory — where evolution experiments with body shapes, sizes and colors. Maybe if a monkey gets a giant schnoz, he'll have a better time finding love?
The result is a biological bonanza. "It's a biodiversity hot spot," says Olival, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist with the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. This rich diversity in the rain forest doesn't apply to just creatures we can see. It also applies to creatures we can't see. Microcreatures. Nanocreatures. You guessed it: viruses.
- New world order: The world is now in uncharted territory when it comes to infectious diseases. We're facing a whole new era. Over the past century, the number of new infectious diseases cropping up each year has nearly quadrupled. The number of outbreaks per year has more than tripled. In the U.S., we have seen more than a dozen new human diseases appear over the past 25 years. For instance, a killer tick-borne virus showed up in Kansas in 2014. A new type of leprosy dismembered a man in Arizona in 2002. And a new hemorrhagic fever jumped from rodents into people, killing three women in California in 1999 — to name just a few. But it's the tropical rain forest that is the most worrisome to many scientists like Olival...
- Bat from the rainforest. Bats are the key pollinators for more than 500 kinds of plants. They keep the rainforest alive.
Read More, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/02/14/511227050/why-killer-viruses-are-on-the-rise
- Borneo's Pygmy elephants are the smallest elephants in the world, standing only 8-10 ft. tall. As the Borneo forest is cut down & replaced with palm oil plantations, its animals end up living near people, giving their viruses a chance to jump into us.
- Our close cousins, orangutans carry several viruses that could potentially jump into people & cause outbreaks, including a new herpes virus & a new virus related to polio. In Borneo, orangutan populations are dwindling as their habitat is destroyed. Only about 40,000 individuals remain.
- Have you eaten food made with this fruit today? Probably. Palm oil comes from these crimson kernels, which cluster together in big bundles. Nearly half of all products in supermarkets contain palm oil.
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