When we cut down forests, people end up interacting with animals that can host diseases that jump from animals to humans. That's what happens with Ebola, for example. As an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Neil Vora, MD helped track and respond to the two largest Ebola outbreaks to date, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic. Now he spends his time trying to reduce both disease outbreaks and climate change by protecting forests as Executive Director of Preventing Pandemics at the Source (PPATS). He recently spoke on Not a Climate Scientist, a podcast from Woodwell Climate Research Center, about the importance of stopping deforestation – a shared cause of epidemics and climate change – because "the threat of infectious diseases is not going away anytime soon."
Vora broke down the causes of pandemics. "Decade after decade, we've been seeing more and more infectious diseases emerge around the world. Most of these are caused by pathogens that start in animals and then jump into people. That process is known as spillover. And spillovers are on the rise because of activities that we are engaging in. The drivers include things like deforestation and the commercial wildlife trade... And then in the back of all of that is climate change, which is just making all of these problems worse. Actually, around half of known infectious diseases have been aggravated by climate change at some point. Each of these different drivers can also be addressed. And that points to our solutions. If we understand why these spillovers are happening more and more, we can actually go backward and reverse engineer solutions to address these problems."
However, there are obstacles to implementing available solutions. "Our clinical medicine system, at least in the United States, is built around waiting for bad things to happen, like heart attacks and treating people in the hospital rather than going upstream and fixing the structural problems that lead to those bad outcomes down the road. And so it's just this perverse incentive system that we have where we wait for the bad outcome to happen."
"And part of this is the financial incentives," he added. "Our academic and government funding structures are designed to reward people who go deep and narrow into subjects rather than people who can lift their eyes and see the bigger picture. It's not that one is more important than the other, but we need different types of people looking at different levels of focus on the problem." That means bringing more people to the table. "We need to make more space at that table and allow other chairs to get brought forward so that we have the veterinarians and ecologists and anthropologists and the zoologists, all these other perspectives, because pandemics are as much a biomedical issue as well as being an ecological issue."
Photo Courtesy DΛVΞ GΛRCIΛ
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