Here’s the most depressing map you’ll probably see this week, thanks to Anthony Fauci, head of the American National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The map, packaged in a recent paper co-written by Fauci, shows the many other emerging diseases besides covid-19 that pose a threat to our health.
The paper, released over the weekend as a preprint in the journal Cell (meaning it could be revised for final publication), is intended to explain the environmental and human factors leading to the eruption of covid-19 on the world stage in late 2019. Fauci’s co-author is David Morens, senior scientific advisor at the Office of the Director at NIAID. It’s an educational read, delving into how emerging diseases like covid-19 and familiar enemies like influencing can become so dangerous to humans.
Viruses like the flu, for example, quickly mutate into new strains that can easily exchange genes with other flu viruses and pick up just the right assortment of genetic tricks that make them more deadly than the seasonal flu and can help spread them widely from person to person. . Coronaviruses are not completely unlawful, but their ability to infect a wide variety of host types makes them more likely to infect humans – and this is the leading theory behind how covid-19 entered the picture.
In fact, it is more than possible, Fauci and Morens note, that the common cold coronaviruses we have today once caused large and deadly epidemics in the past. While this may provide some comfort, as these viruses are now relatively harmful, not all dangerous viruses become tame over time, and those that do often take a long time to eradicate.
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That brings us to the aforementioned map, an exhaustive but not at all an illustration of the emerging and recurring diseases that have plagued us recently or are still plague us (the danger of armed anthrax is marked as a ‘conscious emerging’ disease). Many of these are unlikely to become a pandemic, at least for now. Ebola, for example, is very fatal, but remains relatively difficult to transmit between people. Bacterial diseases such as gonorrhea are concerned because they become resistant to antibiotics, but they are not particularly deadly.
Mankind, however, has long been a vanishingly rare event in the last hundred years averaging a pandemic every 20 years.
Not one of these is to say that we are powerless against the coming water of terror – there is much we can do to prepare for it, and in fact many people have predicted what will happen when covid-19 as recently as last October. But without learning from our mistakes this time, it does not tell us how bad the next pandemic will be.
“Science is likely to bring us many life-saving medicines, vaccines and diagnostics; However, there is no reason to think that these alone can overcome the threat of more and more deadly cases of infectious diseases, “wrote Fauci and Morens. “Covid-19 is one of the most vibrant awakenings in more than a century. It should force us to think seriously and collectively about living in more conceivable and creative harmony with nature, even as we plan for the unforgettable, and always unexpected, surprises of nature. ‘
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