Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world's top scientists |... - 0 views
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the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted,
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These activities cause pandemics by bringing more people into contact and conflict with animals, from which 70% of emerging human diseases originate, they said. Combined with urbanisation and the explosive growth of global air travel, this enabled a harmless virus in Asian bats to bring “untold human suffering and halt economies and societies around the world. This is the human hand in pandemic emergence. Yet [Covid-19] may be only the beginning.”
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Future pandemics are likely to happen more frequently, spread more rapidly, have greater economic impact and kill more people if we are not extremely careful about the possible impacts of the choices we make today,”
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A global “One Health” approach must also be expanded, they said. “The health of people is intimately connected to the health of wildlife, the health of livestock and the health of the environment. It’s actually one health,” said Daszak.
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Daszak said: “The programmes we’re talking about will cost tens of billions of dollars a year. But if you get one pandemic, even just one a century, that costs trillions, so you still come out with an incredibly good return on investment.
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Prof Thomas Lovejoy, at the United Nations Foundation and George Mason University in the US, who coined the term “biological diversity” in 1980, said on Saturday: “[The pandemic] is not nature’s revenge; we did it to ourselves.”
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“It is the consequence of our persistent and excessive intrusion in nature and the vast illegal wildlife trade, and in particular the wildlife markets, the wet markets, of south Asia and bush meat markets of Africa,” he said. Earlier in April, a major study found that the human impact on wildlife was to blame for the spread of viruses.
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“We can emerge from the current crisis stronger and more resilient than ever, [by] choosing actions that protect nature, so that nature can help to protect us.”