Pandemics in the Anthropocene
By Rosanna Harvey-Crawford
Covid-19 has caused a pandemic unlike any in living memory. Although Donald Trump would like to believe the virus originated in a Wuhan lab, the fact is that this crisis has been years, if not decades, in the making. The pandemic and subsequent global lockdown has profoundly shaken expectations of what capacity we have for behaviour change. For weeks, people around the world have lived lives of enforced relative simplicity. As we begin, slowly, slowly, to ease the lockdown around the UK, it is important to not lose sight of the origins of this pandemic, and what role human activity had to play.
It’s suggested that outbreaks of animal borne (zoonotic) diseases like bird flu, swine flu, Sars, Ebola, and the novel coronavirus, are on the rise, and it’s estimated that three quarters of new diseases that infect humans originate in animals. The search for the source of the Covid-19 outbreak focused on one of Wuhan’s ‘wet markets’ (a wet market sells fresh produce and meat), which was known to sell wild animals such as live wolf pups, salamanders, crocodiles, rats, squirrels, foxes and turtles. Informal markets have sprung up to provide fresh meat to rapidly growing urban populations, and disease ecologists say they are a hotspot for pathogens moving from animals to humans. Likewise, urban markets in west and central Africa sell bush meat in unhygienic conditions, with the wet market in Lagos being described as a “nuclear bomb waiting to happen”.
While wet markets pose a serious risk to public health at both a local and global scale, disease ecologist, Thomas Gillespie, notes that sustainable solutions to this issue will not be reached by demonising under-resourced communities, pointing out that these markets provide an essential source of food millions of impoverished people in African and Asian cities. This is echoed by researchers at the International Institute of Environment & Development (IIED) who point out that although the blame is often placed on wet markets, it is important to look at the bigger picture and examine how human behaviour is influencing the evolution of new diseases.
A new discipline called Planetary Health looks at the connections between human wellbeing, other living creatures and ecosystems. Researchers in this field believe it is human destruction of biodiversity that is causing an increase in new viruses and diseases. As our cities and agricultural land expand, we encroach on wildlife habitats and place species under greater stress. The more human activity increases, the more disruption occurs within natural habitats leading to an erosion of biodiversity and higher exposure to new diseases as humans and wildlife come into greater contact with one another. As David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote:
“We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses, we cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”
Planetary Health scientist, Richard Ostfeld, emphasises that although nature does pose threats to humans, it is human activities doing the real damage. Health risks in natural environments are made much worse when we interfere. Deforestation, mining, urbanisation and agriculture can no longer proceed unchecked, and politicians and the public need to be aware of the risks these activities create. Getting this message across to consumers, loggers, hunters and market traders about pathogens and disease is essential. However, the way in which cities are planned is also a key consideration.
Cities provide an ideal site for disease to spread, with the rate of infection increased due to high density populations. Although this has proved a significant problem in both high and low income countries, it is much more serious in cities with a greater number of informal settlements. People living in these settlements have limited access to water, often sharing a tap between many families, lack affordable health care and work in high-risk occupations. Moreover, pollution is proven to increase vulnerability to Covid-19, and research has recently suggested that air pollution particles could help it spread.
The pandemic has highlighted the need to re-assess the impact of human activity on the environment, and examine why so many people around the world are disproportionately more at risk from Covid-19. Sam and James Curran, writing for The Ecologist, have emphasised the need for further regulation to generate a feeling of responsibility and ambition to regenerate the planet’s ecosystems. From Milan to Taipei a reimagining of the urban space is already taking place, and across the world there have been demands for a new social contract, to address inequality and redefine the relationship between governments and citizens, particularly those worst affected by the pandemic.
We have shown during lockdown that we are capable of profound sacrifice and change when a situation calls for it. It is clear that the current mode of living, or ‘business-as-usual’ is not working for either the environment, or the majority of the world’s population. It is important not to frame the actions needed to address climate change and environmental degradation as sacrifices - an inhabitable and equitable earth is after all, a good reward - but hopefully we can retain and improve our capacity to adapt, and increase our capacity to reflect on how we can re-orientate our activities in a direction that considers both people and planet.
