Does the idea of ebola terrify you? Hanta? Zika? AIDS? Do
you ever stay up nights wondering if 100% fatal rabies might one day
mutate so that it can be spread by a sneeze?
Do you ever wonder what is going on that so many new
diseases have seemed to pop out of nowhere?
It may surprise you to know that scientists know very well
why this is happening.
First, to get this out of the way, it IS happening. Unlike a
public perception that there are more earthquakes than ever (there are not),
which is driven largely by having more forms of media to see reports on them,
this event is real. More and more deadly pathogens are appearing all the time
and jumping to humans...and killing some of us.
Why?
In the end, it all comes down to one factor, human overpopulation.
Habitat loss, climate change, and the eating of new sources
of wild meat to survive all contribute. Habitats become smaller and migration
routes are cut off, stranding species or pushing them into more contact with
humans. The animals themselves, stressed by habitat loss have greater
susceptibility to disease. Furthermore, when you put several different sorts of
mammals--including humans--close together, diseases can more easily jump across
species and mutate with the jump.
Animals that once controlled insects that carry diseases, like mosquitoes or ticks, are being driven to extinction. We might not have known
that some little critter kept us safe from a terrible disease, but it
did, and generally we only find this is so when it is too late to regain the animal population needed to help us.
Add to this accidental transfer of animal and insect life
via international shipping (container shipping is an ecological disaster all
by itself), as we in the US, Canada, and Australia import cheap goods from
China, and you have a disaster that has been in the making for decades. You think it's scary now? It's just at its beginning. If you’re young, you’re going to be hearing
about literally hundreds more killer diseases like Ebola before you
die--hopefully of old age, rather than of one of these.
The solutions in the short term are complex. Many brilliant
people are working at them.
The personal solutions you could implement are simple to
list, even though it’s nearly impossible to convince people to implement them.
I know I risk offending you by being blunt, but I will be blunt.
- don’t have more than two children. We all play a part in overpopulation--or its sensible control. If you dearly want a big family, adopt children 3-X.
- don’t buy goods from other countries. “Shop locally” ends up being the right answer not just for the economic health of your community and nation, but for the protection of yourself and your children from emerging disease
- educate yourself about products that cause the worst environmental degradation, and don’t buy them. Two simple changes that you could begin with as you shop next at the grocery store: Eat chicken and domestically farmed fish, rather than beef and pork. Avoid all products with “palm oil” as an ingredient
This isn’t merely some liberal hippie-dippie concept, to
save endangered species and shop locally and think about overpopulation and not
be wasteful of energy. As a species, we’ve been committing collective suicide.
And, as individuals, we can stop doing so.
I hope you never have to look down at a hospital bed and see
your child or grandchild die of something like West Nile, but if you do, and
you are calling out to God “Why?”...the first place you need to look is in the
mirror. Did you do everything you could at a personal level to stop the
mounting disaster from happening? Or did you roll your eyes and turn away?
I’ll be blogging about diseases for a month or two, in
conjunction with the release of my new pandemic thriller, Crow Vector. I’ve
read thousands of pages in research for writing it, and I have a good deal of
scary stuff to tell you about.
