Katie Woolaston, Queensland University of Technology and Judith Lorraine Fisher
Human damage to biodiversity is leading us into a pandemic era. The virus that causes COVID-19, for example, is linked to similar viruses in bats, which may have been passed to humans via pangolins or another species.
Environmental destruction such as land clearing, deforestation, climate change, intense agriculture and the wildlife trade is putting humans into closer contact with wildlife. Animals carry microbes that can be transferred to people during these encounters.
A major report released today says up to 850,000 undiscovered viruses which could be transferred to humans are thought to exist in mammal and avian hosts.
The report, by The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), says to avoid future pandemics, humans must urgently transform our relationship with the environment.
Humans costs are mounting
The report is the result of a week-long virtual workshop in July this year, attended by leading experts. It says a review of scientific evidence shows:
…pandemics are becoming more frequent, driven by a continued rise in the underlying emerging disease events that spark them. Without preventative strategies, pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, kill more people, and affect the global economy with more devastating impact than ever before.
The report says, on average, five new diseases are transferred from animals to humans every year – all with pandemic potential. In the past century, these have included:
- the Ebola virus (from fruit bats),
- AIDS (from chimpazees)
- Lyme disease (from ticks)
- the Hendra virus (which first erupted at a Brisbane racing stable in 1994).
The report says an estimated 1.7 million currently undiscovered viruses are thought to exist in mammal and avian hosts. Of these, 540,000-850,000 could infect humans.
But rather than prioritising the prevention of pandemic outbreaks, governments around the world primarily focus on responding – through early detection, containment and hope for rapid development of vaccines and medicines.
As the report states, COVID-19 demonstrates:
…this is a slow and uncertain path, and as the global population waits for vaccines to become available, the human costs are mounting, in lives lost, sickness endured, economic collapse, and lost livelihoods.
This approach can also damage biodiversity – for example, leading to large culls of identified carrier-species. Tens of thousands of wild animals were culled in China after the SARS outbreak and bats continue to be persecuted after the onset of COVID-19.
The report says women and Indigenous communities are particularly disadvantaged by pandemics. Women represent more then 70% of social and health-care workers globally, and past pandemics have disproportionately harmed indigenous people, often due to geographical isolation.
Read more: The next global health pandemic could easily erupt in your backyard
It says pandemics and other emerging zoonoses (diseases that have jumped from animals to humans) likely cause more than US$1 trillion in economic damages annually. As of July 2020, the cost of COVID-19 was estimated at US $8-16 trillion globally. The costs of preventing the next pandemic are likely to be 100 times less than that.
A way forward
The IPBES report identifies potential ways forward. These include:
• increased intergovernmental cooperation, such as a council on pandemic prevention, that could lead to a binding international agreement on targets for pandemic prevention measures
• global implementation of OneHealth policies – policies on human health, animal health and the environment which are integrated, rather than “siloed” and considered in isolation
• a reduction in land-use change, by expanding protected areas, restoring habitat and implementing financial disincentives such as taxes on meat consumption
• policies to reduce wildlife trade and the risks associated with it, such as increasing sanitation and safety in wild animal markets, increased biosecurity measures and enhanced enforcement around illegal trade.
Societal and individual behaviour change will also be needed. Exponential growth in consumption, often driven by developed countries, has led to the repeated emergence of diseases from less-developed countries where the commodities are produced.
So how do we bring about social change that can reduce consumption? Measures proposed in the report include:
- education policies
- labelling high pandemic-risk consumption patterns, such as captive wildlife for sale as pets as either “wild-caught” or “captive-bred” with information on the country where it was bred or captured
- providing incentives for sustainable behaviour
- increasing food security to reduce the need for wildlife consumption.
An Australian response
Australia was one of the founding member countries of IPBES in 2012 and so has made an informal, non-binding commitment to follow its science and policy evidence.
However, there are no guarantees it will accept the recommendations of the IPBES report, given the Australian government’s underwhelming recent record on environmental policy.
For example, in recent months the government has so far refused to sign the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature. The pledge, instigated by the UN, includes a commitment to taking a OneHealth approach – which considers health and environmental sustainability together – when devising policies and making decisions.
The government cut funding of environmental studies courses by 30%. It has sought to reduce so called “green tape” in national environmental legislation, and its economic response to the pandemic will be led by industry and mining – a focus that creates further pandemic potential.
Read more: New polling shows 79% of Aussies care about climate change. So why doesn’t the government listen?
Finally, Australia is one of few countries without a national centre for disease control and pandemics.
But there are good reasons for hope. It’s within Australia’s means to build an organisation focused on a OneHealth approach. Australia is one of the most biologically diverse countries on the planet and Australians are willing to protect it. Further, many investors believe proper environmental policy will aid Australia’s economic recovery.
Finally, we have countless passionate experts and traditional owners willing to do the hard work around policy design and implementation.
As this new report demonstrates, we know the origins of pandemics, and this gives us the power to prevent them.
Katie Woolaston, Lawyer, Queensland University of Technology and Judith Lorraine Fisher, Adjunct Professor University of Western Australia, Institute of Agriculture
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Humans have always been in close contact with wildlife. The difference now is we can fly around the globe and mingle populations in ways not possible before. But I think we may have found a way to stop that.
Bingo. Close borders and return to a largely self-sufficient lifestyle and the problem goes away.
This whole problem is the inevitable result of globalism, which always results in dangerous pandemics.
End globalism to save Granny!
Reading between the lines…
What they’re really indicating is that there are 850,000 animal viruses that, like SARS-COV2, can be weaponized and delivered into foreign populations at a small sacrificial cost to the nation of origin
Exactly. The only reason the bat covid derivative affected humans is because of “gain of function” manipulation by virologists intentionally enabling it to do so.
Nothing to do with pangolins, wet markets or chopping down trees.
As always the enviro loons manage to spin everything to support whatever their latest issue is.
Soon they will be telling us that the “CO” in COVID comes from our CO2 emissions.
Isn’t it nice of the greenies to be promoting wind power. All those spinning blades will eliminate bats, & get rid of many of their viruses that could endanger us.
And to do it surreptitiously, without even claiming any credit. So nice of them.
Though the Wet Market did have an impact on rate of spread. It is easier to deliver a live animal virus in a live animal. Dead animal flesh doesn’t support live animal viruses for very long.
and the 850k is the top end of a shitful guesstimate with not a shred of FACT to it!
and yeah manmade zoonoses are very popular items in labs
not so much in the real world
they can take their one health and the proposed global whatever s n shove em!
Aus has some pretty good AQUIS regs n checks, we dont get em all incoming but we DO get a lot of illegal stuff in customs n quarantine areas, before it goes further
Id rather tax $ spent on adding to the border customs AQUIS etc.
and Sco-mo would do that
Your thinking to small. Each town and village really doesn’t need to have any contact with other towns and villages. Make every village self sufficient and ban people from other towns from entering. Do whatever it takes to keep the foreigners out. /sarc
The UN wants to use disease as a reason to vastly restrict human interaction with nature. It’s not like we have not been interacting with nature 24/7 throughout human existence. This is just another control feature, just like the UN push to preserve biodiversity when they cannot even define it.
The rain forests and coral reefs are touted as the most delicate of ecosystems, but they have been around longer than any other ecosystems, as evidenced by their having evolved such intricate species relationships. They are actually the most robust ecosystems in the world, while those closer to the poles are simpler and more easily wrecked, particularly by glacial and interglacial periods radically changing the climate.
The UN Fear-Mongering Department is alive and well.
Wait. MASKS ARE WORTHLESS
LOCKDOWNS ARE SERIOUSLY UNHEALTHY FOR EVERYOBDY
END ALL TESTING NOW
Progressives in general, the UN in particular wants to lock people into large cities and prevent travel. It’s easier to control people who are locked down.
There is another solution remove all the animals starting with those pesky polar bears 🙂
what a load of bollox.
maybe close bioweapon labs? could be a good start
exactly!
They’re still trying to push the pangolin story? Wow
At this point it’s obvious that the only effective reform of the UN is abolition.
Any author who says “…up to 850,000 undiscovered viruses…” has lost my attention instantly, except that I can’t help but wonder why they chose the number 850,000? And not, say Thirteen trillion? Now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Usual method is to look on the web and find some published original number, based on research that some real scientist did many years ago, when scientists actually made observations.
Then make up some reasons for multiplying that number until it gets big. For instance, someone could have studied a group of 20 monkeys and found a new virus. Just take the number of monkeys in the world – let’s assume that it’s 10m, assume that every group of 20 monkeys has a new virus, and there’s 500,000 new viruses waiting to be discovered. Please send money…
There are people who die from the virus and people who die from the virus. But there are also people who live with the virus and people who like from the virus. The UN and most of the sensationalist media are composed of people who live from the virus.
Well at least it’s only two significant digits. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them say that studies show that there are up to 863,297.29 undiscovered viruses that we could catch.
If they are undiscovered, how do they know the number?
They base it on the number of undiscovered artists trying out for “The Voice” and multiply by the latest pro-Biden poll figures, then subtract the number of conservative comments not yet censored on social media.
It’s a fairly simple calculation, but subject to sudden variances.
😎
Pop,
There’s usually a fudge-factor.
That can be found by employing dart-throwing chimpanzees, many of whom have access to gin and rum.
Auto
They use Climate Modeling software Paul and the Media will tell you that climate models are 97% accurate because…well, consensus don’t you know.
Then Ron, when we add to that the Chinese Communist’s who weaponize viruses in their Wuhan facility but wait the Propaganda Ministry aka the Worldwide Press refused to acknowledge the Chinese role in virus creation and worldwide distribution. To them this didn’t come from the Wuhan Province it spread globally from European Climate Change.
Its so much Easier for these JournoBorg to sit down at a computer and make up numbers and then blame them on man burning fossil fuel. CO2 is also know to cause liver spots on Granny and incontinence in Grampa. D@mnedable CO2. “OUT DAMN CARBON.” I have this ingrown toenail and I’m guessing that the global production of SUVs has something to do with it.
There will be a bat soup party at WHO following the usual cocktail party for diplomats. Remember to social distance.
Except it seems to be more like Social Dissonance
Yeah, funny thing about applied progressivism — all the initial sympathetic lip service for the downtrodden is so readily forgettable when the ‘meat tax’ greatly affects their access to the desirable item while wealthy commissars are little affected by such ‘equally’ leveled restraints. Indeed this seemingly inverted outcome recurs so often that it must reflect a reliably insincere propelling feature of these elite human led regimes.
Let me know when China is called out….on anything.
Exactly. “Cracking down on wildlife trade…” for every country, except for China.
A closer contact with nature is extremely dangerous. It has to be avoided at all costs.
Exactly. All of civilization has been a steady movement away from Nature. It’s great to look at, but try being left in it for a few weeks. It’s no fun at all.
All animal herds need to be culled from time to time just to ensure the strength of their DNA pool and to vastly reduce the possibility of cross infection
It is the fault of our ancestors…they stayed away from nature…washed their hands with strong antiseptic products…wore masks….called in a hazmat team after killing a wooly mamoth to carve up the meat and freeze it. They were just too careful …so no herd immunity. Sigh.
TS Clarke good comment.
Importance of gut bacteria
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/hunter-gatherer-gut-bacteria-may-hold-secret-of-a-healthier-diet/
Great story
My takeaway is we need to stop obliterating wild and I disturbed lands to build wind, solar and biomass non-green destructive energy.
Return more land to the wild, give the animals more space
And sorry China, but your habits have to change, whether shark fins, bear gall bladders, rhino horn, ivory whatever
You need to get over these old time beliefs
Now that there are so many rich capitalists in China the world cannot support such eating and “medicine” habits.
My thoughts exactly Pat.
How’s bulldozing millions of kilometres/miles of land flat across the globe to install renewables going to fix anything? Destroying the natural habitats, homes and waterholes, and displacing every animal, and living creature seems counter productive to me. Where do they think the surviving animals go?
Where did logic go? Do these people think anything through?
“Environmental destruction such as land clearing, deforestation, climate change, intense agriculture and the wildlife trade is putting humans into closer contact with wildlife.” Really? I would think life in the middle ages, given living conditions, would have been the ultimate close contract with nature. And of course, they did have their plagues to deal with. I don’t buy today’s practices as any more risky than any other previous period of time.
“I would think life in the middle ages, given living conditions, would have been the ultimate close contract with nature.”
How else could the story of Peter and the wolf come to be? Let alone Goldilocks and the three bears, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood or any other ancient folk tales describing human encounters with potentially dangerous animals and natural phenomena.
“I don’t buy today’s practices as any more risky than any other previous period of time.”
We have never been more sanitised.
Peck of dirt and all that.
A peck of dirt would go along way. Keeping kids too clean helps kids loose some of their immune function.(studies in Sweden and other places)
Of course, all three of my kids, dirt grubbers all, got all sorts of allergies, asthma, and other ailments.
Guess it must have something to do with genetics and maybe inherited immune problems.
And yet the Wuhan wet market is open with nary a castigation.
Because neither horseshoe bats nor pangolins were on offer in the market late last year, if ever.
Horseshoe bats, whether from Yunnan, whence came SARS, or 1000 miles away in Hubei, don’t have enough meat to make them marketable.
But they adore meat-free chicken feet! 🤣🤣🤣👣
-Mom, can I have some more monkey kidney please ?
-Not unless you finish your chocolate ice-cream first !
“……….up to 850,000 animal viruses could be caught by humans, unless we protect nature………”
Um. If we ‘protect’ nature, surely we will end up with MORE wildlife, not less? And more wildlife means more viruses…
Agreed!
The obvious course of action based on their research – is the deliberate extinction of all species that pass dangerous viruses to humans!
Just imagine the wonderful utopia we could achieve if we followed their “expert” advice.
wait, what? what happens if we destroy the vectors? (please don’t do that)
Really, climate and pandemic scams in one report.
They are always trying to link the two. The CAGW scare is losing ground to the covid scare.
The covid scare is actually working, unlike the CAGW one. They need to jump on that covid bandwagon to keep the CAGW scare going.
“in one report” – why, of course! It saves important resources when you combine things such as that.
This is just another step in the UN’s march towards obtaining the global levers of power.
Another UN Doom Report. It seems most lines for ‘doom reports’ go back to the UN.
Instead of creating the young generations a nice and pleasant future UN overwhelms them with depressing ‘doom reports’ because ‘it sells so good’ and because ‘everyone publishes it’. Greta represents well the depressed new generations. Thanks UN! Great job!
This article is dumb on so many levels. Lets take three cited examples.
Lime disease is spread by deer ticks from infected rodents (field mice), not deer. Deer are merely a transmission vector for the ticks. And whitebtail deer have been increasing because of (a) reduced hunting pressure and (b) increased habitat as farming became more efficient and reforestation occurred (deer thrive on woodland edges, not deep woods or cleared farmland.) Many years on my 260 acre Wisconsin dairy farm, we would take ten or twelve each hunt and not make a dent in the population, which could literally mow down newly spouted 10 acre alfalfa or soybean fields in a single day (they feed at dawn and dusk).
Deforestation reduces wildlife habitat, not increases it. So decreases potential human exposure to zoonotic diseases.
Number of potentially transmissible zoonotic viruses is just a made up guess. Heck, as posted here in re COVI-19, we do not even know definitively how many human common cold rhinoviruses serotypes there are, only about 100. (We do know there are exactly 4 common cold coronaviruses, and exactly 1 common cold adenoviruses.) and we know COVId-19 usually, but unfortunately not always, has common cold like outcomes. With Darwinian evolution now removing the unfortunate outcomes, perhaps in time it will merely become the fifth human common cold corona virus.
With Darwinian evolution now removing the unfortunate outcomes….
I think the ones being removed are generally past the age of reproduction….
It’s now suspected that one of the four human cold coronaviruses was the pathogen behind the 1889 Russian “flu” pandemic. Similarly, the horrific H1N1 Spanish flu evolved into the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which might have caused as many as 12,000 US deaths. Also into the 1957 H2N2 Asian flu (which almost did me in), now extinct in the wild, thanks to a vaccine, and less devastating H3N2 Hong Kong flu, to which Asian flu survivors were largely immune.
The obvious answer, if the agenda was really to protect humans, would be to kill off species that are most likely to transmit diseases.
But because if the mad mad world we live in, we’ll spend billions trying to improve the living conditions of bats and rats. Perhaps we could fund annual spring cleaning and an onsite vet for each cave and sewer.
Or, more humanely and effortlessly, just turn off the Bat Signal.
I wonder what the medieval peasantry were doing wrong then living in misery close to nature?
Clearly some virus or bacterium wasn’t obeying the script. As pointed out why not thirteen trillion or any other number you can make up. Beyond absurd people can publish or put forward garbage like this.
… and actually isn’t this an argument for wiping out all the animals?
Given that the current world human population is around 7,500,000,000 souls, a really bad pandemic with a kill rate of 99.999% would leave a residual population of 75,000. With several continents to chose from, these folk would have room to move and be able to pick up some pretty neat real estate.
I think the underlying problems is that the “ scientists” who write this stuff, think that they will be part of the 75,000.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus believed to cause COVID-19, which may have a laboratory source. Perhaps a progenitor to a vaccine, which escaped prematurely into the public space.
Prematurely? Or by design??
In that case speak to China.
How many diplomats at the U.N. Headquarters were Covid carriers for the New York outbreak that was arguably the country’s deadliest and centered on Manhattan? Seems a little more dangerous than nature.
“A major report released today says up to 850,000 undiscovered viruses which could be transferred to humans are thought to exist in mammal and avian hosts.”
So we know how many undiscovered viruses there are? That’s really clever.
up to 850,000 undiscovered viruses
Thousands of species that may or may not have ever existed, which experts believe are now extinct, until one, perhaps two are discovered. and rediscovered The truth is out there.
That said, hundreds of thousands of human lives, annually, in America alone, victims of social progress and justice, whose voices were suppressed, whose arms were removed, and lives aborted, now lying in the tomb of the unknown baby… a wicked solution.
Undiscovered viruses are the most dangerous ones. Look at what the new coronavirus did just after being discovered.
Just in time for Halloween. Cool… I mean Boo!
Wow. The Pandemicocene. Or should that be the Pandemonium? What next, the Anthropodemicocene?
“Environmental destruction such as … climate change, … is putting humans into closer contact with wildlife.”
Indeed, due to climate change, it often rains cats and pangolins.
Pangolin make a lousy house pet!
More victimhood for womyn and indigenes from ugh! civilization. They need to be turned out into the wilderness for their own good.
Thankfully, UN satraps in urban highrises with caviar dispensers in their limousines have recognized the horrors of ugh! civilization and are johnny-on-the-spot with recommendations for the Fourth (or is it the Fifth?) World. No more cutting trees, more mud huts, eliminate agriculture, eliminate “trade” and other economic foofrah, force humans to starve while huddling in the cold and dark, and the Planet will be saved. Hooray for our saviors, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). What would we do without them?
Note to Google, Twitter, and Facebook: have you fact checked these bozos? Would you please censor and/or cancel them.
But according to Google, etc., the “bozos” are the one and only true Source of “facts”.
we had one of our vocal “first nations”( yeah last i remember that was USA native indian peoples not Aussie aboriginals..).claiming that SARS had hurt their people massively
so i looked it up very few cases a few deaths and NOT ONE was aboriginal
but gee her impassione specch sure got media play by abc our socialist communist agitprop govvy funded scam centre
How about if humans spent some time developing a more robust immune system. Maybe pandemics would become less of an issue.
Up to 850,000 undiscovered planets in our galaxy that have intelligent life (Republicans) using nuclear power for Everything!
What we have here is an article about a UN report.
You know that telephone game … by the time the message gets all the way around the circle it is unrecognisable. Other than the premise and most of the facts, there’s something about the article that feels wrong. I can’t put my finger on it but I have the feeling that the authors have somehow distorted the original.
“Environmental destruction such as land clearing, deforestation, climate change, intense agriculture and the wildlife trade is putting humans into closer contact with wildlife.”
Thankfully, the science says clear-cutting millions of acres of trees for solar farms cannot negatively affect animals at all and thus does not put us closer to them in nature. But cutting down one tree for a fracking well releases a super-duper coronavirus that will only 99.8% of people will survive. Therefore, if you support fracking, you automatically want grandma to die. Clearly, people who support fracking are worse than Hitler. It is science, after all. Who are you to argue with science, grandma killer?
The UN has strayed far from its’ original mission of preventing wars and no one seems to be checking them. No wonder they espouse the One World Government mantra with themselves as the leader.
Isn’t it amazing how every threatening thing in the world has the same solution – progressivism? What a remarkable coincidence!
That sounds like a call to destroy as many animals as possible to get rid of those diseases.
The “political” science is in and irrefutable. We must follow this political science.
Alarmism has captured every university and is such an inconvenient truth.
“Up to 1.7 million: current estimate of ‘undiscovered’ viruses in mammal and water birds, the hosts most commonly identified as origins of novel zoonoses” (hint: but mostly bats)
Just give us your money and we can save you ….
But according to Google, etc., the “bozos” are the one and only true Source of “facts”.
There are what line 7 or 8 billion people on planet ? With such large numbers just by pure chance people will have contact with animals ( like bats ). Do to the sheer size of those numbers it is unavoidable!!! People have no grasp of probability numbers. Combine this with international travel and well it is guaranteed viruses will jump the species barrier and spread quickly around the world. The main defense is technological advancement in cures and vaccines. This idea of somehow managing the barriers between human and animals is ridiculous with 7 to 8 billion people ! Of course risk can be reduced but it will not be even close to eliminated. We already have had sars, MERS, Covid. New diseases will come, it is a mathematical certainty.
We destroy nature at our own peril
If viruses cannot use wildlife as hosts, we will become the hosts.
The next plague will be worse, and the next still worse.
https://youtu.be/cVBppz64n_A
Let’s kill the jungle before it kills us!
“So how do we bring about social change that can reduce consumption?”
See, they’re smarter this time. Before, the communism was to bring success in next 50 years, and give everyone as much as they wanted, according to their needs, for nothing. Now as everyone knows it’s stupid and impossible, people won’t believe it so they need to be scared into accepting communism with pandemics.
And communism is ultimate totalitarianism – you own nothing, you are nothing, state owns everything, state is everything, you defy the state, you die. Of course, all the excess consumption taken from the masses will be looked over by trusted individuals with impeccable ideological allegiance. After all, Bill Gates says he can fly a private jet plane because no one does more to combat climate change than he.
Yes, he actually said that.
There is exactly one BSL4 laboratory in China doing gain of function research. Of the millions of cities, towns and villages on earth, a contagious, deadly virus emerges. What do these have in common? Wuhan. I don’t buy for a second that this was an entirely spontaneous epidemic, or that someone caught this virus from a Wuhan market. The only question is whether the Chicoms did this as an act of biowarfare or accidentally.
Or an happy lab accident that was turned into warfare.
Incompetence and sloppiness is common. Then they suffered from it, then profited from it.
Meanwhile, Remdesivir does not work but is still being supported for use?
” …. large clinical trial supported by … WHO announced on October 15, showing that remdesivir does not reduce the mortality or the time COVID-19 patients who are administered the drug take to recover.”
” … ‘This is a very, very bad look for the FDA, and the dealings between Gilead and EU make it another layer of badness,’ Eric Topol, a cardiologist who objected to remdesivir getting the FDA’s approval, told Science.”
We still have zero idea what the origin of the so called corona “pandemic” is, and they are speculating about other viruses?
Even if the origin of AIDS is not a vaccine in Africa in that universe and neither is the origin of the corona a lab in Wuhan (and perhaps not the French one), in other universe that clearly happened, because it’s at least vaguely plausible in ours.
using green monkey kidney tissue in the HepB vaccine the promoted heavily to the gay pop was the likeliest source for AIDS/HIV as Ive read inmore than one souce over the yrs
the Reston Ebola scare was also from phillipines green monkeys
“UN report says up to 850,000 animal viruses could be caught by humans, unless we protect nature”
How about we protect people instead?
I am all for nature preserves and places we protect for humans to experience the wild, but you cannot protect humans from viruses by protesting nature – that is just stupid.
In 20 years we will be able to produce radical new vaccines very quickly, and THAT is where we should invest money. That and mass production within friendly borders (i.e. NOT China). The U.S. has no excuses to not have all the medical infrastructure needed to produce any and all drugs it requires. All that prevents us from this is stupidity, greed, and short shortsightedness. This stupidity needs to end.
Well that has really spooked me out (maybe it’s Halloween) I was fine with life’s challenges right up to 849,999 infectious threats, those I have come to accept as part of the living risk, but to imagine, (did I say imagine?) there are the full 850,000 pathogens just waiting to get me, that is just too much. 🙂
The madness of crowds, plus the political manipulation of fear, is where the real risks are to be found.
Isn’t hooman some sort of animal?
In Asia animal husbandry conditions are so bad that viruses get out of control and leap species.
The Wuhan virus though was intentionally collected from bats in a cave by Siu Jenghli, and has nothing to do with farming.
Swine flu and the 1918 flu were from pigs in Texas and Mexico. Pig farms.
None of this is due to habitat loss. This report is yet another thinly disguised attempt to implement Agenda21.
Am wondering, how does one “persecute” bats? I wasn’t aware that bat beliefs are objectionable … ah well, I suppose we should stop in the name of bat equality and justice … persecution only ever makes the faithful even more confident.
Twat them with a giant composite blade.
That’ll learn ’em…
The moronovirus is spreading widely.
Nasty cluster of infection at the UN.
Simple exterminate the host the virus also dies