I’m going to step back and take a larger
picture about it, because I’m very interested
in one health and climate and planetary health.
And I know we’re all obsessed about this
virus, but I think we have to think about
what some of the activities that have happened
in this Anthropocene,
where men have impacted the planet.
We have changed the ecology of how we live
with animals, so that if you look at most
of the emerging viruses and the emerging diseases
that have happened over the last hundred years,
they’ve been what we call zoonoses.
And zoonoses are spillover from animals.
This particular coronavirus was noted first
in a seafood market in Hunan, and it has to
do with the fact that there probably — even
though this is a bat coronavirus, we do not
know whether there’s an amplifier animal
in SARS1, which also started in a seafood
market in an area in China.
It’s the intimate living with humans and
animals and spillover.
In SARS 1, it was probably a civet cat that
was being sold.
For a while, SARS2, this particular virus,
was thought to be an amplifier with a pangolin,
a highly trafficked animal.
We know now that that’s probably not true,
and we don’t know exactly how it actually
began in the seafood market.
But I want to bring us back to this idea that
we need to be doing better surveillance in
our animals and doing a better job with our
planet.
The large Nipah virus epidemic had a lot to
do with deforestation and movement of bats
closer to other animals, and another novel
virus emerged.
So I want to bring people back to some of
the larger issues, when we think about these
emerging viruses that happen in the world.
And a connection to climate change, to the
climate crisis?
Yeah.
Well, that is important.
Climate change, deforestation and changing
ecology is crucial
for how we have animal and human ecology change.
