The pandemic is our fault

Like climate change, the corona is the result of human ravages.

Most have joined that the world’s plague, the corona virus, was transmitted to humans at an animal market in China.

Infecting the pangolin from shellfish may sound unbelievable, but it is alarmingly common: Up to 60 percent of all infectious diseases in humans are transmitted from animals.

And it is not on their initiative, exactly.

To be hunted, caught, sold and consumed on a large scale have enormous negative consequences for the animal kingdom, both at the individual and species level.

There is a kind of morbid justice in the fact that it can have deadly consequences for us too.

By the end of october The International Panel on Nature (IPBES) presented a report on pandemics.

22 of the world’s leading researchers have contributed and the conclusion was brutal:

Pandemics are driven solely by human activity, and the future will offer them more and more.

They will spread faster, take the lives of more people, and hurt the economy more than COVID-19 has.

The calculations show that Currently, there are up to 800,000 viruses that can spread to humans and become pandemics in the future. However, that such viruses kill us is nothing new.

The black death, the Spanish flu, smallpox, polio, diphtheria, measles and tuberculosis are examples of diseases that we have contracted from the animal kingdom.

Like pandemics, they have cost billions of lives.

Diseases like transmitted from animals to humans are called zoonoses. Some of these are developed to be able to be passed from person to person.

That’s when it starts to get really serious, because we travel and meet a lot. This is how some zoonoses turn into pandemics, like the one we suffer from today.

Swine and avian flu, mad cow disease, Ebola, Marburg, Mers and Sars have recently devastated the world. We have all had contact with animals, and mainly with wild species.

We can’t blame lack of warnings that a pandemic like the corona was on the way.

Already in 2004 it hit A report in the renowned journal Nature fixed the following unpleasant fact: Of all the diseases that are on the rise, wildlife zoonoses are “the most important and growing threat to global health.”

In 2013, author David Quammen published the book “Spillover. Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic ”. Here he predicts that the next pandemic to hit us is a zoonosis. He was correct.

Both Quammen and The Nature report is very clear about what increases the likelihood of pandemics: the more we remove untouched nature and natural habitat for wildlife, the closer we end up living to these species and their diseases.

As Quammen says: When you kick trees, things fall apart.

Have we followed the warnings? No.

Almost 70 percent of all wildlife disappeared between 1970 and 2016, and we are not giving up. Converting unspoiled nature to agricultural land is the most important reason.

Outside the jungle, that is, palm oil must be grown here.

Another way that Exposing ourselves to wild animals is to look for them directly, that is, to capture them.

For example, the HIV virus was transmitted to humans when we were hunting chimpanzees in the 1920s. So far, 33 million people have died from the virus.

Although China banned animal markets after the corona outbreak, it is still allowed to trade in wild animals if it is for medicinal purposes.

In Chinese folk medicine, animal organs are a popular ingredient.

However, it makes no sense to push the East forward as the only irresponsible ones: when the World Health Organization (WHO) updated its official diagnosis overview in 2019, they chose to include a number of alternative diagnoses.

Several of them are floating, to say the least, as is the treatment method. Bear gall, tiger penises, and pangolin shells are now official medicines.

In this way, the UN helps bless both serious animal cruelty and the high risk of infection.

It is not alone In distant cultures, handling animals has catastrophic consequences.

On Monday night, TV2 broadcast the following sensational message:

“Rewarded for killing quickly: 15 million minks to be gassed. Run before midnight.”

Mutated coronavirus has been found in Danish breeding mink and more than 200 people have been infected.

We are not going to eat or get rid of these animals, we are simply going to decorate ourselves with the corpses.

I don’t know what is more stupid.

Industrial livestock ours is another infection threat. The extremely unnatural lifestyle of our pets is forced, which makes them, and us, vulnerable to disease.

For example, it was only 20 years ago that more than 100 people died as a result of mad cow disease. They had eaten animals carrying the disease, which in turn had arisen because we fed the cows with relatives of their own species.

Once again, it is difficult to say that we are completely innocent in our destiny.

Then it is not Especially useful to imagine to ourselves that it happened that a Chinese crown fell ill in Wuhan one day in 2019.

Zoonoses and pandemics are part of a larger system, in which humans are central to both cause and effect.

In the past, people lived in extremely poor conditions and could do nothing but let the plague ravage.

Today we have a completely different knowledge about infection and zoonoses, but we still choose to behave like refined barbarians towards nature and wildlife.

I do not want to say We necessarily deserve the pandemic, but at least we have ourselves to thank.