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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Remember: as the number of humans is growing, and we are encroaching on the natural habitats of wildlife further and further, the chances of new zoonotic diseases is increasing, not going down. I'm not saying that bird flu will be it, but next covid-scale pandemic will very likely come sooner rather than later.

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Calling attention to this but "as the number of humans is growing, and we are encroaching on the natural habitats of wildlife further and further" is a "mother-nature's revenge" meme and isn't really true.

Zoonotic plagues are not new but pandemics can spread much faster now due to cheap travel and relatively open borders.

Expansion into previously unpopulated areas (logging the Amazon, for example) does have risks. Marburg virus likely comes from an animal living in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitum_Cave ; it's hardly implausible that expanding human habitation/activity into new areas may uncover more.

Speed of travel certainly makes things worse, but even in the 1300s diseases were able to spread widely.

The speed of transmission hasn't really changed much since the beginning of the worldwide shipping trade. Whether the virus spreads in a few days or a few weeks hardly matters over the full course of a pandemic. We know that a virus (either influenza or another coronavirus) spread worldwide in 1889 fairly quickly.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111

It's more than a meme, but documented by research. Some citations:

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn2222

> The key issue, then, is not that zoonotic diseases appear in humans, but that their emergence seems to be increasing in frequency (3). Major changes in land use, increasing urbanization, and global connectedness are well documented as driving disease emergence through increasing human–animal contacts and accelerating transmission rates, and climate change will similarly accelerate the rate of zoonotic events.

It's not a paper in itself but it says what I've been saying above way more eloquently. It also cites this paper:

https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06536

> Here we analyse a database of 335 EID ‘events’ (origins of EIDs) between 1940 and 2004, and demonstrate non-random global patterns. EID events have risen significantly over time after controlling for reporting bias, with their peak incidence (in the 1980s) concomitant with the HIV pandemic. EID events are dominated by zoonoses (60.3% of EIDs): the majority of these (71.8%) originate in wildlife (for example, severe acute respiratory virus, Ebola virus), and are increasing significantly over time.

Lastly, some other recent research: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29378-2

I will stand by the meme characterization. The first links assumes Covid was zoonotic which is a fine assumption but not a high quality conclusion and the second link shows the trend peaking in the 80s and then decreasing. Since the world population was only 60% what it is today, that is strong evidence that at absolute minimum the relationship is nonlinear and perhaps inverts at higher population sizes (as wild biodiversity decreases).

To be quite honest, citing research on a politically polarized topic is not as useful as it used to be.

The political polarization within the academy means that there is a lot of pretty loose research that may get through if it has the appropriate orientation. In practice, you can almost always find (low quality) research supporting one’s position if the position is lefty.

Humans have always been part of the natural ecosystem alongside wildlife.

What is new is the virus gets on a plane and goes 500 mph.

Zoonotic diseases are more frequently associated with animal husbandry. Also this encroaching has been being walked back in North America and Europe for a long time, and China more recently. In the coming decades India will follow suit and Africa will bring up the rear. Demographics are not a one way street and economic development means most people moving away from the countryside and into cities.

Really? I would think that the risk was higher when almost all humans lived in close physical proximity with their livestock - as in slept, ate, etc. in the same structure. What has changed now is that zoonoses are being spread all over the world in a couple of days.

Except bird flu won't come from wilderness, it will come from animal agriculture. The current worry is that the place it will develop mammal-to-mammal and ultimately human-to-human transmission is mink farms, and the incubator for the disease among birds is chicken farms.

Stop eating and wearing so many animal products and we'll be fine even with billions and billions of people all over the world.

Seriously, I know I'm coming off as an angry veg here, but are people blind to the fact that COVID likely came from a meat market (I mean the lab leak is also possible but the original meat-market theory is pretty likely too), and bird flu will come from meat-animal industrial farms and fur farms?

Humans have been eating and wearing animal products since before we were even Homo sapiens. We'll be fine regardless. If the cost of using animals is an occasional pandemic then so be it, that's just the natural order of things.

"Natural order of things" stopped mattering the moment we decided that starvation and infant mortality are bad things.

COVID was milder than expected. The next one might not be.

"COVID happened because we eat meat and wear leather" is a hilariously bad take.

psst, mink aren't used for leather.

And yet the chances of some do good scientists opening more labs and refining crispr and playing saviour to stop the next pandemic means that the odds of another lab leak is increasing much faster than natural spillover.

In natural spillover, the disease gets a single shot at infecting and then transmitting.

In a lab leak, the disease has been kept alive and cultured with human cells for hundred of generations. Then undergone various genetic tweaks to see where if might attack and take hold in humans. If it can escape the lab, it has astronomically better odds of surviving in humans and transmitting to other humans.

I'm doubtful we see more than 2 or 3 natural spillover events in the next 50 years. I'm expecting a dozen lab leaks in that time the way technology and collection efforts are going.

The 2030s are going to be a shit show. The crispr tools available.... OmG

why would urbanisation increase disease?

90% of the population used to have direct contact with farm animals

> why would urbanisation increase disease?

Population density to spread in? Large open plan workplaces, public transit, concert halls...

> 90% of the population used to have direct contact with farm animals

A localized, fairly small, not very mobile set of farm animals.

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