Aaron Bernstein, director of the Climate MD program at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health. There's a whole story around the palm oil industry, destroying forest tropics to plant palm oil trees," said Dr. "There's evidence that there is loss of forests in West Africa for palm oil. He said our risk for any zoonotic or emerging viral infections is going to rise over time.Īn example of this is the recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. "As you make that interface between humans and the natural world smaller, we just come in more contact with those things and climate enhances the ability for viruses to infect us more easily," said Pan. Animals can carry viruses and bacteria that humans can encounter directly, through contact, or indirectly, through things like soil or water supply, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Zoonotic diseases are caused by germs that spread between animals and people.
Scientists are looking closely at the relationship between climate changes and zoonotic diseases, like COVID-19. The probability of another pandemic is "going to probably increase because of all of the environmental changes that are occurring," Willian Pan, an associate professor of Global Environmental Health at Duke University and one of the study's authors, told ABC News. The researchers said this could double in years to come. They also found that the probability of a person experiencing a pandemic like COVID-19 in one’s lifetime is around 38%. Their calculation is a sophisticated prediction based on known risks and can be a useful guide for policy makers and public health officials. The researchers used data from epidemics from the past 400 years, specifically death rates, length of previous epidemics and the rate of new infectious diseases. The likelihood of an extreme epidemic, or one similar to COVID-19, will increase threefold in the coming decades, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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