Now there is a lot of discussion about the structure of the virus, its infectivity and ways to deal with it. And it is right. But somehow little attention is paid to an equally important topic - the causes of the coronavirus pandemic. And if you do not understand the cause and do not draw the appropriate conclusions, as was the case after previous epidemics of coronaviruses, then the next major outbreak will not be long in coming.
An understanding must finally come that the current irresponsible and consumerist attitude of people towards each other and the environment has already exhausted itself. And no one can feel safe. In today's world it is impossible to create "one's own" well-being, separate from other people and living nature. When 821 million people go hungry on a regular basis (according to the latest UN data), and others enjoy travel and tropical beauty, throwing a third of the food produced into the trash, this cannot end in anything good. Humanity can only exist normally in the One World, One Health model. In which there is no consumer attitude, but there is a rational approach to the mutually beneficial existence of the entire ecosystem of the Earth.
An article by David Quammen in The New York Times is about this.
We made the coronavirus epidemic
It may have started with a bat in a cave, but it was human activity that started the process.
The name chosen by the group of Chinese scientists who isolated and identified the virus is abbreviated as "2019 Novel Coronavirus", nCoV-2019. (The article was published before the virus was given its current name SARS-Cov-2 β A.R.).
Despite the name of the new virus, as the people who named it so are well aware, nCoV-2019 is not as new as you might think.
Something similar was found a few years ago in a cave in Yunnan province, about a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, by a group of astute explorers who noted their find with concern. The rapid spread of nCo2V-019 is striking, but not unpredictable. That the virus did not originate in a human, but in an animal, perhaps a bat, and perhaps after passing through another creature, may seem surprising. But this is not surprising for scientists who study such things.
One such scientist is Dr. Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who gave nCoV-2019 its name. It was Zheng-Li Shi and his colleagues who, back in 2005, showed that the causative agent of SARS is a bat virus that got into people. Since then, this team of scientists has been tracking coronaviruses in bats, warning that some are uniquely suited to causing a human pandemic.
In a 2017 paper, they described how, after nearly five years of collecting fecal samples from bats in a Yunnan cave, they found coronaviruses in several individuals of four different bat species, including the horseshoe bat. According to scientists, the genome of this virus is 96 percent identical to the virus from Wuhan, recently discovered in humans. And the two make up a pair unlike any other known coronavirus, including the one that causes SARS. In this sense, nCoV-2019 is new and perhaps even more dangerous to humans than other coronaviruses.
Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based private research organization focused on the connection between human health and wildlife, is one of Dr Zheng-Li Shi's longtime partners. βWe have been sounding the alarm about these viruses for 15 years now,β he said with calm disappointment. "Since SARS emerged." He co-authored a 2005 study on bats and SARS and a 2017 paper on multiple SARS-like coronaviruses in a Yunnan cave.
Mr. Daszak said that during this second study, the field team took blood samples from 400 Yunnanese, about 3 of whom lived near the cave. Approximately XNUMX percent of them had antibodies against coronaviruses similar to SARS.
βWe don't know if they got sick. But it tells us that these viruses are being transferred from bats to humans multiple times.β In other words, this Wuhan emergency is not a new development. This is part of a series of related contingencies that go into the past and will continue into the future as long as current circumstances persist.
So when you're done worrying about this outbreak, worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances.
Current circumstances include a dangerous wildlife and food trade, with supply chains traversing Asia, Africa and, to a lesser extent, the United States and other countries. This trade in China has been outlawed on a temporary basis. But it also happened during SARS, and then it was allowed to trade again - bats, civets, porcupines, turtles, bamboo rats, many kinds of birds and other animals piled together in markets such as in Wuhan.
The current circumstances also include the 7,6 billion people on Earth who are constantly in need of food. Some of them are poor and in desperate need of protein. Others are rich and extravagant, they can afford to travel to different parts of the world by plane. These factors are unprecedented on planet Earth: we know from the fossil record that no large animal has ever been as numerous as humans are now. And one of the consequences of this abundance, this power and the ecological disturbances that come with it is an increase in viral exchange - first from animal to person, then from person to person, sometimes on a pandemic scale.
We are invading rainforests and other wild landscapes that are home to so many species of animals and plants, and within them are so many unknown viruses. We cut trees; we kill animals or put them in a cage and send them to the markets. We are destroying ecosystems and shaking off viruses from their natural hosts. When this happens, they need a new owner. Often it is us.
The list of such viruses appearing in humans sounds like a gloomy drumbeat: Machupo, Bolivia, 1961; Marburg, Germany, 1967; Ebola, Zaire and Sudan, 1976; HIV, in New York and California, 1981; Hunt form (now known as Sin Nombre), Southwest US, 1993; Hendra, Australia, 1994; bird flu, Hong Kong 1997; Nipah, Malaysia, 1998; West Nile, New York, 1999; SARS, China, 2002-3; MERS, Saudi Arabia, 2012; Ebola again, West Africa, 2014. And this is just a selection. We now have nCoV-2019, the final blow to the drum.
The current circumstances also include bureaucrats who lie and cover up bad news, and elected officials who brag to the crowd about clearing forests to create jobs in the forestry and agriculture industries, or cut health care and research budgets. The distance from Wuhan or the Amazon to Paris, Toronto or Washington is short for some viruses, measured in hours considering how well they can travel with airplane passengers. And if you think funding pandemic preparedness is expensive, wait until you see the final cost of the current pandemic.
Fortunately, the current circumstances also include brilliant, dedicated scientists and outbreak response specialists, such as scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the China CDC, and many others. institutions. These are the people who go to bat caves, swamps and high-security laboratories, often risking their lives to obtain feces, blood and other valuable evidence to study genomic sequences and answer key questions.
As the number of new coronavirus infections has increased, and the death toll with it, one indicator, the case fatality rate, has so far remained fairly stable at around or below 3 percent. It's relative luck - worse than most flu strains, better than SARS.
This good fortune cannot last long. Nobody knows what the development will be. In six months, Wuhan pneumonia could be history. Or not.
We are facing two major challenges, in the short and long term. Short term: We must do everything in our power, with intelligence, calmness and full commitment of resources, to contain and extinguish this nCoV-2019 outbreak before it becomes the most devastating global pandemic. Long term: We must remember that when the dust settles, nCoV-2019 was not a new event or a disaster that befell us. It was part of the choice model that we humans make ourselves.
Translation: A. Rzheshevsky.
Source: habr.com