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According to a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the likelihood of an extreme epidemic or one like it like COVID-19 will triple in the coming decades.
The researchers used data from epidemics over the past 400 years, specifically death rates, duration of previous epidemics and rates of new infectious diseases. Your calculation is a sophisticated prediction based on known risks and can be a useful guide for policy makers and public health officials.
They also found that the likelihood of a person going through a pandemic like COVID-19 in their lifetime is about 38%. The researchers said this could double in the coming years.
The likelihood of another pandemic “is likely to increase because of all the environmental changes that are occurring,” Willian Pan, associate professor of global environmental health at Duke University and one of the study’s authors, told ABC News.
Scientists are closely examining the relationship between climate change and zoonoses like COVID-19.
Climate change and zoonotic diseases
Zoonoses are caused by germs that spread between animals and humans. Animals can carry viruses and bacteria that humans can encounter directly, through contact, or indirectly through things like soil or water supplies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“If you shrink that interface between humans and the natural world, we just get more exposure to these things and the climate increases the ability of viruses to infect us more easily,” Pan said. He said our risk of zoonotic, or emerging, viral infections will increase over time.
An example of this is the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
“There is evidence that forests are being lost to palm oil in West Africa. There’s a whole story about the palm oil industry destroying forest tropics to plant palm oil trees,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, director of the Climate MD program at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health.
“In this case, there are bats that live in these forests, but they cannot live in palm oil plantations. And so these bats migrated to a part of West Africa where they infected people with Ebola,” Bernstein said.
According to the CDC, zoonotic diseases now account for 60% of all diseases and 75% of emerging diseases.
“More animals are coming into contact with more people, but in many cases they have also resulted in animals colliding with other animals,” Bernstein said. “What we have observed is that animals and even plants run to the poles to escape the heat. And as they do so, they may encounter creatures they’ve never encountered before. And that creates an opportunity for spillage to happen.”
Health workers at a COVID-19 isolation facility, March 7, 2022, in Hong Kong, China.
Louise Delmotte/Getty Images, FILE
looking ahead
Currently, scientists are trying to catch up with virus outbreaks by struggling to develop vaccines, sometimes after an outbreak has already gotten out of hand.
“We cannot counter pandemics with band-aids. That is, after waiting for diseases to surface and then trying to figure out how to solve them,” Bernstein said.
Pan added, “If we want to prevent another major global pandemic from completely disrupting our society, we need to start investing heavily and sharing information on surveillance of various viral infections between countries.” There are some places in the world where we don’t even have the basic ability to assess or test strains, viral fevers get into hospitals. And so many of these things go unchecked until it’s too late.
Preventing these diseases requires not only global collaboration, but also attention to the root cause of the problem.
“We need to address the spillover. And that means we need to protect habitats. We must fight climate change. We need to address the risk of factory farming because many pathogens spread from wild animals to livestock and then to people,” Bernstein said.
According to Reuters, global spending on COVID vaccines is expected to reach $157 billion. The annual expenses for forest protection are much lower.
“We’re about to throw a lot of money into solutions that only address a fraction of the problem. We’re getting very little back compared to what we could be getting back for a dollar spent on post-spillover interventions versus root-cause prevention,” Bernstein said.
Emma Egan is an MPH candidate at Brown University and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
