The next pandemic may emerge from wildlife trade, intensive farming, land clearing, laboratories, global travel or antibiotic resistance, as human behaviour continues to multiply the risks of another major disease outbreak.

Who will unleash the next pandemic? Will it be farmers, loggers, wildlife traders, scientists, land developers, or tourists? Or, maybe, all of the above?

The next pandemic is already here, quietly incubating in some ravaged rainforest, melting tundra, intensive livestock farm, laboratory or pet shop. Getting ready to board an airliner, a cruise ship, invade a shopping mall or child-minding centre on its way to your front door.

Fresh warnings about the dangers of a new global disease outbreak have been sounded by the Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife (AHRW) and the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).

The GPMB, set up in 2018 to head off future pandemics, has concluded that, despite the lessons of Covid, “health, economic, social and political impacts of health emergencies have not diminished, and in important areas are growing. In short, reforms have not kept pace with rising pandemic risk.”

While the AHRW warned of rising threats to both human and animal health resulting from a growing world trade, and markets, in wildlife. “Zoonotic outbreaks and pandemics have far-reaching consequences beyond public health. They affect global economies, increase poverty, affect ecosystems and biodiversity, and compromise the health and welfare of wild and domestic animals,” the Alliance says.

There have been seven pandemics since 2000: SARS, Swine Flu, MERS, Covid, Ebola, Zika and Monkeypox, Meanwhile, an eighth, HIV-AIDS, is ongoing since the 1970s. Together these have claimed from 51 to 90 million lives – more, indeed, than World War........

© Pearls and Irritations