I’ve been pissing and moaning about this for years now (ask my friends, they think I’m crazy and obsesses). But it’s real, and it sucks:
Lincoln, Neb., February 16th, 2015 — The appearance of infectious diseases in new places and new hosts, such as West Nile virus and Ebola, is a predictable result of climate change, says a zoologist affiliated with the Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In an article published Sunday in conjunction with a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B., Daniel Brooks warns that humans can expect more such illnesses to emerge in the future, as climate change shifts habitats and brings wildlife, crops, livestock, and humans into contact with pathogens to which they are susceptible but to which they have never been exposed.
“It’s not that there’s going to be one ‘Andromeda Strain’ that will wipe everybody out on the planet,” Brooks said, referring to the 1971 science fiction film about a deadly pathogen. “There are going to be a lot of localized outbreaks that put a lot of pressure on our medical and veterinary health systems. There won’t be enough money to keep up with all of it. It will be the death of a thousand cuts.”
Brooks and his co-author, Eric Hoberg, a zoologist with the U.S. National Parasite Collection of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, have personally observed how climate change has affected very different ecosystems. During his career, Brooks has focused primarily on parasites in the tropics, while Hoberg has worked primarily in Arctic regions.
This takes place concurrently with the underfunding of public health systems, unregulated free trade and ever faster means of importation.
It’s a good thing that they’re bringing out a new class of antibiotics to fight these new bugs. Apparently all antibiotics are found in the soil. Currently we are using only about 5% of what’s available because they hadn’t found a way to grow the rest in petri dishes. But in the last three years that all changed.
The problem is that we’ll all die from air pollution and not Ebola courtesy of Big Oil. You simply can’t pump millions of tons of carbon gases into the atmosphere year after year and expect to be able to breath it in without any harmful effects.