(CN) — Here's an unsettling possibility: The deadly coronavirus infecting millions of people around the planet may turn out to mark the onset of an age in which a natural world under siege from human activities injects more new diseases into humanity's ever-more-globalized bloodstream.
Scientists are warning that climate change, deforestation, population growth, industrial farming and globalization are creating conditions for more viruses like the novel coronavirus to emerge from obscure recesses of nature and infect humans. Scientists call this a spillover and they say the world needs to prepare for more of them.
“Probably those viruses that we are getting now have been there all along in those forests, in the permafrost,” said Jean-Michel Claverie, a professor of genomics and bioinformatics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in France, in a telephone interview with Courthouse News.
“Now just because we are getting onto those territories, we are catching the virus too,” he said. “We are now in places where we should not be.”
In his laboratory in southern France, Claverie is studying ancient viruses buried for millennia under the permafrost in Siberia. They are unlike any viruses previously known and scientists warn these ancient viruses could be released as the planet warms and thaws Siberia's frozen ground.
As yet, scientists say there’s no known case where an ancient virus under the permafrost has infected humans. But, they say, it’s possible a disease that once killed Neanderthals may re-emerge and infect humans.
“One reason [no one's been infected] is that there is not much population in such an area, but that doesn't mean there are no viruses which could be dangerous to humans,” said Chantal Abergel, a virologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. She studies these ancient viruses with Claverie, her husband. In reviving ancient viruses, the French researchers said they are finding microbes likely capable of infecting animals and plants.
Viruses lying dormant in the frozen grounds of Siberia may pose a threat, but it's the millions of viruses already circulating among animals that present the most immediate danger of spilling over to humans and then spreading around the world — as the novel coronavirus causing Covid-19 is doing. Viruses, unlike bacteria, are so dangerous to humans because effective medicines and vaccines to combat them are extremely difficult to concoct.
Of course, humans have always been vulnerable to epidemics — most often caused by zoonotic diseases, linked to animals — and died from them.
“You might get the impression from looking at Western newspapers that there are sort of one or two big epidemics a year and that's it,” said Dr. Jimmy Whitworth, a physician and infectious disease specialist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in a telephone interview. “Well, that's very far from the case. If you look over the last 40 to 50 years, you'll see epidemics reported everywhere all the time.”
At any one time, he said the World Health Organization’s Africa office is investigating dozens of outbreaks. “So that gives you a sense that this is all around and everywhere,” he said.
While it's true that humanity has always been susceptible to epidemics, today disease outbreaks spread much more easily and quickly around the world as global trade and travel increases.
“Pandemics are increasing in frequency because of globalization,” said Christine Kreuder Johnson, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, and a specialist in emerging diseases, in an email.
“We changed the conditions for those viruses to travel,” Claverie said. “Before, it was just traveling by foot with people who got infected. But now those viruses are traveling by plane and in much bigger populations, in supermarkets, in malls, and so this makes life much easier for those viruses.”
