Climate Change Creating New Virus Hotspots 'in Our Backyard'
07 May 202214:04 PM
Climate Change Creating New Virus Hotspots 'in Our Backyard'
This article was written by Daniel Lawler in AFP:

Climate change will drive animals towards cooler areas where their first encounters with other species will vastly increase the risk of new viruses infecting humans, raising the threat of another pandemic, researchers warned Thursday.

There are currently at least 10,000 viruses that have the capacity to cross over into humans "circulating silently" among wild mammals, mostly in the depths of tropical forests, according to a study published in the Nature journal.

But as rising temperatures force those mammals to abandon their native habitats, they will meet other species for the first time, creating at least 15,000 new instances of viruses jumping between animals by 2070, the study forecasted.

This process has likely already begun, will continue even if the world acts quickly to reduce carbon emissions and poses a major threat to both animals and humans, the researchers said.

"We have demonstrated a novel and potentially devastating mechanism for disease emergence that could threaten the health of animal populations in the future, which will most likely have ramifications for our health too," said study co-author Gregory Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University.

"This work provides us with more incontrovertible evidence that the coming decades will not only be hotter, but sicker," Albery said.

The study, five years in the making, looked at 3,139 species of mammals, modelling how their movements would change under a range of global warming scenarios, then analysing how viral transmission would be affected.

They found that new contacts between different mammals would effectively double, with first encounters occurring everywhere in the world, but particularly concentrated in tropical Africa and Southeast Asia.