Zoonotic Disease on Our Doorsteps: Why COVID-19 has reminded us that wildlife conservation is more important than ever
By Kate Thompson, Safina Center Launchpad Fellow
Conservation and human heath are intimately interrelated. In talking about protecting wildlife, people will often causally say “you know—when we harm nature, we harm ourselves.” Still in lockdown in Brooklyn as COVID-19 spreads across the nation, I have been reflecting on the weight of the truth behind those words.
We as scientists better understand the porous margins between illnesses of animals and ourselves. Lessons from several outbreaks in last century have taught us that the intermingling of wild animals and domestic animals often opens a pestilential pandora’s box. Yet as humans continue to push farther into forests, we bring our livestock and ourselves closer to that vulnerable intersection. We are well aware that the hunting and consumption of bushmeat, sometimes for survival and sometime for status, is another vulnerable intersection. The “injured hunter” hypothesis of the origin of HIV/AIDs is a simplified yet likely explanation for how Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIVs) left chimpanzees and became endemic to humans.
COVID-19 most likely traveled from bats, via an intermediary host such as pangolins, to humans. Pangolins are one of the most trafficked endangered animals in the world as well as known zoonotic disease vectors. We live in the age of these zoonotic spillovers—at least 75% of emerging diseases originate from such events. Yet we are perpetually stunned by their frequency and virulence. How are we continuously caught unawares on both a governmental and societal level as yet another pathogen makes this interspecies leap?
Bat in Madagascar. Photo: Kate Thompson
Bats are known carriers of coronaviruses like COVID-19. Photo: Kate Thompson
The best conservation programs are often the most interdisciplinary ones; nowhere do we see a tighter blend of wildlife protection and human health initiatives than in bushmeat and zoonotic disease research. Since the advent of the Trump administration, it has been much harder to find funding for such work.
One such loss was that of the PREDICT project, part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program. This initiative brought together organizations and scientist across the globe—including conservationists, epidemiologists, medical anthropologists, veterinarians (the list goes on) to create a holistic understanding of the risk factors within human-wildlife interactions that may lead to emergent diseases. This inclusivity is in the realm of what we call “One Health.” One Health is an approach to research and policy that emphasizes the interconnectedness between human, animal, and environmental health. It says, simply, that neither the preservation of human health nor the conservation of nature can occur in a vacuum.
As I stare out my apartment window, down at the streets of masked and gloved people below, I’m more confident than ever that although we’ve ignored this reality on a societal level, it came for us all the same.