The outbreak of coronavirus has created a certain amount of chaos around the world. The death toll in China itself has gone above 100 and number of cases infected by the virus in China has now crossed 42,638.
Imagine the last scene of the movie Contagion if you will. Where it is shown how it started with a banana being nibbled on by a bat, a pig then eats part of the same banana and is later butchered to be served as a dish at a high-end restaurant, where the virus gets transferred to the first victim of the disease (Beth, portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow). And at some point, the chef who prepares the pig also shakes had with Beth after only wiping his hands on his apron.
The Nipah virus, which was contained quite effectively and soon, thanks to the doctors and other medical staff in Kerala, where it originated, too, was a zoonautic virus that originated from bats.
“Environmental changes have a huge impact on the emergence and reemergence of certain infectious diseases, mostly in countries with high biodiversity and serious unresolved environmental, social, and economic issues. An extensive literature review revealed a relationship between infectious diseases outbreaks and climate change events or environmental changes . Due to strong global and local influence on emergence of infectious diseases, a more holistic approach is necessary to mitigate or control them in low-income nations,” says Environmentalist, inventor and poet Anadish Pal.
Pal also says how Chikungunya, dengue fever, yellow fever, Zika, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, leptospirosis, leishmaniasis, and Chagas disease are an example of relationship between infectious diseases outbreaks and climate change events.
One relation according to scientists, between infectious disease and climate change is that, our immune systems becomes naturally less effective when the temperature rises. One main reason according to experts for this is when an external pathogen enters our body, our body increases its temperature or we get a fever in order for it to make the pathogen to survive in a high temperatures. But as the external temperatures go up and pathogens learn to survivive in it, the pathogen is also equiped to survive higher temperatures in our body.
“In a divergent population, viruses are contained due to every individual's distinct and unique immunological response. The viruses are weaked and contained in the bodies of the hosts. However, if the hosts are all quite similar, then the viruses are able to proliferate and replicate with greater success (happens in very identical animals in an animal farm). Once the virus base is huge, it is able to mutate and might become more virulent to jump the species gap to infect other species too,” Pal says.
Bats regularly have their internal temperature jump to as high as 105 dge. But in umans that happens only when we have a fever or fighiting an infection. Hence, bats have an heightened capacity to survive despite being infected by a dnagerous pathogen.
In the case of the Wuhan virus, according to scientists, it can be originally traced to SARS-related coronaviruses that are found in bats. And since the virus can spread even through fecal matter, any mammal that comes in contact with the fecal matter or nibbles on fruit that a bat carrying the virus may have nibbled on, can contract it and thus pass it to humans.
Cutting back on wildlife trade could keep a check on spread of such pathogens that can later be transmitted to human. Deforestation, that ultimately destroys habitats of bats and causes them to migrate will also help limit spread of probably dangerous pathogens or spillover of new viruses. Deforrestation over the years, has brought various bat species closer to humans in search for new habitats, researchers say.
In 2012 the MERS virus jumped to humans from camels, which were originally infected from bats several hundred years ago, reads a story in The Conversation. The Nipah virus too, similarly came to humans from bats via domestic animals.
