The globalised world is consistently experiencing breakouts of viruses of various kinds and shapes that affect the people to varying degree. Since many years the world has seen the eruption of Coronavirus, Polio, Ebola and Monkey pox and many other minor forms of such illnesses that cause widespread distress.
There are several factors that why such viral outbreaks happen and why with such frequency. The reasons range from shifts in migration and travel patterns, global eating habits and the effects of climate change that have created new opportunities for microbes to spread.
Moreover, better testing and monitoring methods also allowed detection of these outbreaks sooner than in the past. In wake of these facts it is predicted that what is now experienced is now is likely to become the new way of life compelling people to adapt to a riskier world.
It must be kept in view that most infectious diseases that humans consider new already exist in animals.
Some animals do not get sick from them but host them in their bodies such as the HIV epidemic that started when humans came into contact with an animal and spilled over from chimpanzees into humans and began spreading from human to human. With HIV, that spillover likely occurred in the early 1900s but it took decades until scientists realised it was killing people.
Human ability to detect new diseases through laboratory testing is getting better every day, so public health agencies are detecting new threats faster. But this does not completely explain why so many new infections have emerged or why so many old infections, such as polio, have returned.
The bacteria, viruses and other microscopic threats are playing offence, and the systems created to detect and respond to infectious diseases are playing defence. Over the past 20 years, the offence has gotten stronger but our defence simply has not kept up. There are many reasons for the microbes to be getting stronger.
Humans are encroaching into animal environments, such as forests and jungles, at a greater frequency. It has shown that the highest-risk place for new diseases to emerge is at the edge of forests and jungles and the animals that survive and thrive there are also those most likely to carry infectious diseases that are dangerous to humans: rats and bats. Sometimes, the spillover is not direct but goes through an insect.
Humans are growing, trading and consuming animals in greater numbers. As economies grow and lift people out of poverty, people want to eat more protein, which means a greater need to grow animals in large numbers and sell and ship them around the world. The more animals are concentrated together, the more likely a new disease is to spread among them, then spillover into humans, including through contamination of food and water. New drug-resistant superbugs such as strains of salmonella often arise this way.
Humans are concentrating in cities more than ever before. If you want a disease to spread person-to-person, there’s no better place than one in which lots of people are packed into small homes, living next to other families in small homes and rubbing up against each other every day. In fact, most major cities around the world have been shaped in one way or another by previous epidemics.
Humans are moving more. This includes people migrating across borders and flying around the world for business or pleasure. It is no surprise that, in the United States, the city with the most international connections — New York — is always the first or hardest city to be hit by new infectious diseases, such as Zika, covid-19 and monkey pox. This is the reason that the most populous cities are usually more vulnerable to the outbreak of viruses as was proved by the case of the spread of coronavirus in China.
Climate change has supercharged all of these factors and has hugely contributed to this phenomenon. Extreme weather events, droughts and changes in temperature are leading humans to migrate to cities, cross borders and chop down forests and jungles to look for new land for growing crops or finding food.
Those changes are not unique to humans. Animals, mosquitoes and ticks are also finding new places to settle, leading to tropical diseases now occurring in places no one ever thought of before as tropical.
It is imperative to understand to stay safe and make sure that all safety measures are ensured. The people on the periphery of health are required to be taken special care of as they are part of families and may become the carriers and communicators of viral diseases. Keeping good sleep habits, exercising regularly, eating a healthy diet, taking medications as prescribed and consulting family doctor is mandatory.
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