By Abdul Tejan-Cole
On March 17, 2016, 42 days and two incubation cycles since the last person confirmed to have the Ebola virus disease in Sierra Leone tested negative for a second time, the Government of Sierra Leone and the World Health Organisation (WHO) marked the end of the Ebola epidemic in the country.
On June 1, 2016, a similar declaration was made for Guinea. Liberia followed on June 9. More than 28,000 people were infected, and over 11,000 people died during this epidemic.
Today, four years on the world is facing a global pandemic. As I write, there are more than two million confirmed cases, 135,692 deaths and 523,478 recoveries. The price of this pandemic will be horrifying. The downturn will be steep and brutal. Many businesses will fold. In the US, 16 million people have already filed for unemployment. All walks of life will be devastated.
Although the index case for the current COVID-19 pandemic has not yet been identified, several scientists have suggested that the virus was transmitted from animals to humans. The common consensus was that the virus jumped from animals to humans in a seafood market in the province of Hubei in China. Although the venue of the transmission of the virus was challenged in a study published in the Lancet titled “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China” the paper confirmed the animal to human transmission. Coronaviruses are common in animals of all kinds. The paper notes that “Both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV were believed to originate in bats, and these infections were transmitted directly to humans from market civets and dromedary camels, respectively. Extensive research on SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV has driven the discovery of many SARS-like and MERS-like coronaviruses in bats. In 2013, Ge and colleagues reported the whole genome sequence of a SARS-like coronavirus in bats with that ability to use human ACE2 as a receptor, thus having replication potentials in human cells.” Many other illnesses have transmitted from animals to human. Bats are said to be the source of Ebola. HIV is believed to have crossed from chimpanzees to humans in the 1920s. Mosquitoes transmit Zika.
The current pandemic brings into sharp focus zoonotic diseases caused by harmful germs like viruses, bacterial, parasites, and fungi. These diseases and many others like bird and swine flu are spread by animals to humans. Many reasons may be attributed for this leap. In many parts of Africa, bushmeat, including bats and apes, are widely hunted and eaten. The eating of these animals is believed to be a significant cause of the spread of diseases. But this is not unique to Africa. As mentioned, the current pandemic is thought to have originated in a wet market, a marketplace selling fresh meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods, in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province in China. These markets sell fish and freshly slaughtered animals and exotic wildlife including giant salamanders, wolf pups, snakes, rats, civets, foxes, baby crocodiles, raccoon dogs, squirrels, weasels and boars.
Apart from eating wildlife, the destruction of the habitat of animals is also another major cause. As a result of the massive destruction of forests, animals are moving from their natural habitats and getting closer to humans, thereby increasing the likelihood of transmission. In an article in Mongabay titled “Deforestation and disease: How natural habitat destruction can fuel zoonotic diseases,” the science and environment author, T.V. Padma, notes that “close to a third of diseases that emerge are linked to large-scale land-use change like deforestation and well over half of diseases that emerge are coming from wildlife in forests – including such well-known examples as HIV and Ebola.” She cites Thomas Gillespie, associate professor at the department of environmental sciences at Emory University, who point that there are many examples of pathogen spillover related to deforestation for agricultural monocultures including palm oil, for example Nipah and Lassa viruses; sugar cane and soybean in the case of hantavirus. Gillespie also traces the emergence of Nipah virus to deforestation for palm oil production and an El Niño-driven drought that led to large-scale burning of rainforests in Indonesia. He notes that “forced to find food elsewhere, fruit bats, which are long-distance flyers made their way to Malaysia, where industrial-scale pig farming was expanding rapidly – to the scale of about 500-1000-hectare farms with 25,000-50,000 pigs.” The global demand for palm oil was the driver for the large-scale land-use change that led to the spillover of Lassa virus, which causes a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola in humans and can kill 30 percent of the infected, in West Africa, says Gillespie. From Sierra Leone to Nigeria, native forest-living rodents were forced to seek out food when forests were cleared to establish palm oil plantations.”
Logging, industrial agriculture, oil exploration, and mining also causes of deforestation. So are the construction of large dams such as the Koukoutamba dam in Guinea which is estimated will push at least 1500 chimpanzees closer to extinction by destroying their habitat. In a New York Times article titled “We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic notes that “we invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”
Though many people seem surprised about this pandemic, many others including Barack Obama and Bill Gates predicted the outbreak of pandemics. For years, epidemiologists have been warning of this type of pandemic. In the last 30 years, there has been an upsurge in the emergence of new infectious diseases. Like we defeated Ebola, we will no doubt find a cure for COVID-19, but this pandemic clearly illustrates that we need to do much more than find a cure or a vaccines for the virus.
The first opportunity we will have to show how serious we are may happen in October this year when the 2020 UN Biodiversity Conference is held in Kunming, China. Africa will join the rest of the world to review the successes and failures in the implementation of the Strategic Plan and negotiate a global biodiversity framework for the post-2020 era for the Convention on Biological Diversity. The new Framework will guide conservation strategies for the next decade and impact the health of every person on the planet. This Conference will provide an excellent opportunity for Africa and the rest of the world to show we have learnt the lesson from this pandemic, and we are ready to act seriously. Africa is in a uniquely strong position to have its voice heard. It has an extraordinarily rich biodiversity and ecosystems as well as a wealth of indigenous and local knowledge. It is the last place on Earth with a significant assemblage of large mammals. Yet, it is incredibly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and losing its biodiversity at an extremely fast rate. By 2100, climate change could result in the loss of more than half of African bird and mammal species, a 20-30% decline in the productivity of Africa’s lakes and significant loss of African plant species.
In Kunming, Africa must speak with one voice and raise its bio voice to ensure that urgent action is taken to not only to bend the curve of biodiversity loss by 2030 but to restore biodiversity. The Pan-African Action Agenda on Ecosystem Restoration for Increased Resilience provides an excellent platform for our united stance. Preserving our biodiversity is critical to our health and wellbeing. It can promote and support food security, dietary health, livelihood sustainability, vaccines, nutritious food, clean air and drinkable water. It also provides important resources for traditional and modern medicine. Most importantly, as we have seen with the current pandemic biodiversity loss and ecosystem change can increase the risk of emergence or spread of infectious diseases and cause immense loss to humanity. It is up to us to do what is right.
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