We Are Creating Conditions for Diseases such as Covid-19 to Emerge As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the novel coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics. By John Vidal 60 Global Goals Yearbook 2020
ECOLOGICAL LESSONS Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off. But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped, or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest. I traveled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity “hot spots” such as tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities. It took a day by canoe and then many hours down degraded forest logging roads passing Baka villages and a small gold mine to reach the village. There, I found traumatized people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90 percent of the people it infects, would return. Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed a chimp. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. A few, such as Nesto Bematsick, recovered. “We used to love the forest, now we fear it,” he told me. Many of Bematsick’s family members died. Only a decade or two ago, it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans, such as Ebola, HIV, and dengue. But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19 – the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019 – to arise, leading to profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline – planetary health – is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections among the well-being of humans, other living things, and entire ecosystems. Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as roadbuilding, mining, hunting, and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s, and that is unleashing new terrors today? >> Global Goals Yearbook 2020 61
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H.E. António Guterres The Covid-19
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