(continuing from the other week)
There are 10. Two the other week: Celsius and Conflagrations. This week, another two:
The fact is: we’re facing a lot of rapidly-spreading and deadly diseases in our world today. It’s not just COVID19, which broke out in China on Jan 12, 2020, and is now spreading in other countries; it’s bad news, yes, but so were the dengue fever outbreak in Chile (Feb 22, 2020), yellow fever in Uganda (Feb 21, 2020), Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Feb 20, 2020), Lassa fever in Nigeria (Feb 20, 2020), and MERS at the UAR (Jan 29, 2020).
These might not have been wide-spreading as COVID19, but they’re deadly as well.
African swine flu, bird flu, tuberculosis, you name it, the world is increasingly concerned with the resurgence of diseases that were thought to have been already controlled like polio and measles, and the emergence of new ones like SARS, West Nile Virus, Zika, and, yes, COVID19.
A daughter gave me a quick lesson on these: “Vector- and water-borne infections like malaria, schistosomiasis, dengue, West Nile virus, and cholera, and zoonoses are especially prone to climate-related influences.
Vector-borne infections are mostly because of expanding (and I add: worsening) habitat for vectors; water-borne are related to increased frequency of natural disasters and/or compromised or scarce water supply.
Zoonoses are related to things like food scarcity (increased consumption of bushmeat)” (and I add: due to, say, prolonged drought), “or habitat loss (pushing wild animal populations nearer to human settlements). There are other factors but these are the main ones.”
She flags a bit of caution about the link of climate change and epidemiology: “Anthroponoses, or those that are limited to human-to-human transmission, or where the only known reservoir is humans…” are less sensitive to climate changes.
“Measles, polio, and tuberculosis are like these. They can also be related somehow to climate change but by a stretch — climate pressure ..” (and here again I add: combined with other demographic and economic factors such as those related to the phenomenon of “climate migration”) “. . may be driving increased human population densities or increased malnutrition, and therefore, increased vulnerability to infections – but if you go by that route of reasoning, you can end up linking ANY infectious disease to climate change.” (M. J. M. Kimwell, personal communication, 2020).
Not surprisingly, biorisk reduction is a high gear effort of the WHO (https://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/year/2020/en/).
For good reason. For all that we have from modern medicine, recent outbreaks have been one too many.
And we don’t need to talk about deaths. The numbers keep changing. Mostly upward.
And, for now, we’re even still talking only of pandemics affecting animals and humans (which I suggest we refer to as “zoopandemics” even if no such term exists in the dictionary yet).
What if there’ll be pandemics affecting plants? A “phytopandemic” would be even more disastrous as it threatens lower tiers of our food chain and ecological structures.
We don’t want to just live in or with Nature, we want to tame it so that it lives for us, and behave according to our bidding.
Where we would want to have vast open farms, we burn and clear forests. Where we want more open flatlands for housing, airports, and other infrastructure, we bulldoze hills and “make mountains low”.
Elephants in the forests and plains? No, we’d rather want to make them work for us. Wild animals? If they can’t serve our purpose for pleasure, labor, or food, we simply wipe them out.
Talking of food: we want what we want from Nature. If it can’t get all that we want of an item of food from it, perhaps because it can’t grow or reproduce fast enough by its natural means, well, we’ll re-engineer its biology — like giving it growth hormones, and using technology to reduce the population of the other living things that compete with us for it.
Having much improved our understanding of Nature, we formulate chemical compounds that we know would kill the “pests” of the plants we want for food, and improve the ways to kill the “predators” of the animals we’d like as food.
(We use “pests” and “predators” often to refer to all living things that compete with us for an item of food we want from Nature.)
If pesticides become an issue about their toxicity to us (as they have been), well, why not genetically modify the plants we want to eat instead, so their pests would find them toxic, and we’ll have all of those plants for ourselves?
If we think that open- range cattle-raising is much too risky because of our inability to fully control environmental conditions, well, why not raise as many cattle we can in pens, and simply inject them with more antibiotics so they don’t get sick when packed too close to each other?
In one sense, we could look at science and technology (and their use on enhancing Nature’s ability to support human life and aspirations) as blessings indeed. And they are.
The question is: what is the limit of Nature’s resilience to its incessant human modifications, before it collapses?
Another question: while Nature modification is in itself understandable, and in fact, expected (even desired) with respect to the inherent interest of the intelligent humans to survive, are the modifications we’ve been doing so far, the best possible and most optimal mix to ensure our long-term survival, and the survival of life — as a phenomenon — in our planet?
I submit that at the end of the proverbial day, these are the more fundamental questions that would need to be addressed, by all of us, over and above questions about any one modification being done. Because, after all, we really don’t want progress to be eventually self-negating.
Another two catastrophes. But the good news is, again: people are doing something about them. Trying their best to reduce our risks and vulnerabilities to them.
With faith on them, and on God, we look forward to their successes. (These are to be discussed in a series of columns following this series on catastrophes we face.)
Week after next, another two….
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