By Carolyn Beeler
[…]
The more we come into contact with wild animals, the more we risk a so-called disease “spillover” from animals to humans.
[…]
“As people move and wildlife move in response to a changing environment, humans and wildlife and animals will come in contact more regularly,” said Jeanne Fair from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
[…]
It’s the early days for this kind of research, but previous studies suggest that extreme weather has already played a role in at least one outbreak. Scientists say drought and deforestation combined to force bats out of rainforests and into orchards in Malaysia to find food. Those bats, a common disease reservoir, then passed the Nipah virus through pigs to humans for the first time in the late 1990s.
[…]
“We’re going by the past data to really predict what’s going to happen in the future,” Fair said. “And so, anytime you increase that wildlife-human interface, that’s sort of an emerging disease hot spot. And so, that’s just increasing as we go forward.”
[…]