Biodiversity loss, emerging pathogens and human health risks
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EDITORIAL
Biodiversity loss, emerging pathogens and human health risks Dirk S. Schmeller1 • Franck Courchamp2 • Gerry Killeen3 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases are occurring with increasing frequency and consequences, including wildlife diseases and zoonoses. Those have potentially longlasting effects on human and wildlife populations, with inevitable direct and indirect effects on ecosystems. The intensifying emergence of infectious pathogens has many underlying reasons, all driven by the growing anthropogenic impact on nature. Intensifying pathogen emergence can be attributed to climate change, biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, and an increasing rate of wildlife–human contacts. All of these are caused by synergies between persisting intense poverty and a growing human population. Improved global management of the human-driven biological degradation and international dispersal processes that exacerbate those pandemic threats are now long overdue. It is vital that we act decisively in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis to radically change how we collectively manage the planet as a whole. Keywords Covid-19 Zoonoses Pandemics Disease pyramid Ecosystem health
Introduction In 2020, the global public was abruptly reminded that pandemics can pose a serious threat to public health and economies on worldwide scales. Most people remember that only few years ago the world was threatened by a SARS outbreak, as well as epidemics from avian and porcine strains of flu: H1N1 and H5N1, respectively. Yet, one of the most comprehensive studies on the topic (Jones et al. 2008) showed that the number of zoonoses have been mounting across the planet in recent decades, augmenting the probability of epidemics and pandemics in the human population. In fact, 75% of emerging human Communicated by David Hawksworth. & Dirk S. Schmeller [email protected] 1
ECOLAB, Universite´ de Toulouse, CNRS, INPT, UPS, Toulouse, France
2
Universite´ Paris-Saclay, CNRS, AgroParisTech, Ecologie Syste´matique Evolution, 91405 Orsay, France
3
School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, and Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Republic of Ireland
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Biodiversity and Conservation
pathogens are zoonotic, meaning they have an animal origin (Taylor et al. 2001). Zoonoses have always existed, but their frequency and their geographic spread are increasing. For example, the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) has been regularly infecting individual humans in Central and Eastern Africa for hundreds of years without establishing itself as the transmissible human disease we now know as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Sustained human-to-human transmission only occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, but such emergence from the zoonotic reservoir has now occurred at least three times, resulting in as many distinct lineages of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) today (Sharp and Hahn 2011). Pe
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