The problem is that cutting down forests and expanding towns, cities and industrial activities creates pathways for animal microbes to adapt to the human body. In fact, most of these microbes live harmlessly in animals’ bodies. wild animals are not especially infested with deadly pathogens poised to infect us.
Although stories illustrated with pictures of wild animals as ‘the source’ of deadly outbreaks might suggest otherwise.
Most, more than two thirds, originate in wildlife. The majority, 60%, originate in the bodies of animals. They include HIV, Ebola in West Africa, Zika in the Americas, and many novel coronaviruses. Since 1940, hundreds of microbial pathogens have emerged or re-emerged into territory where they’ve never been seen before. But speculation about which wild creature originally harboured the virus obscures a more fundamental source of our growing vulnerability to pandemics: the accelerating pace of habitat loss. The animal origin of the disease is a critical mystery to solve.
Or, as one later-debunked theory suggested, a snake. The race is on to identify the animal source of Covid-19, the coronavirus that now holds several hundred million people in quarantines and cordons sanitaires in China and elsewhere.
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