Unless a novel disease emerges or is manufactured that totally outclasses everything nature came up with in earth's history, we're going to be fine.
Unless a novel disease emerges or is manufactured that totally outclasses everything nature came up with in earth's history, we're going to be fine.
1. As other commenters have pointed out, the ease of spread of any disease is orders of magnitude higher now than it was during cave-man days. With crowded cities, public transit, and air travel, pandemic-level diseases can spread across the world in a matter of days or weeks.
2. Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. We are, in a sense, selectively breeding pathogens that are both good at infecting humans and resistant to our treatments. That is a focused selective pressure that has never existed before, and may pose the biggest threat to us in the next 50-100 years. For a concrete example, look at this experiment which shows how quickly bacteria can evolve to overcome levels of antibiotics that are orders of magnitude more than we would ever give a human [0].
Yes, there will generally always be some subset of the human population that is resistant to any particular disease, but our measure of success is not "5% of humans will survive the next pandemic, so we're all good, let's it move along nothing to see here." If we start to regularly have drug-resistant pathogens that make hospital stays very dangerous for patients (imagine having a 1/3 or even 1/10 chance of dying at a hospital due to an infection entirely irrelevant to your condition) or just more common COVID-level pandemics, that would be a serious disruption to humanity, significantly increase general mortality rates across the board, and drastically change life as we know it.
I don't think that makes sense when comparing against the threat level of pre-antimicrobial times. It didn't matter that they weren't resistant before we had antimicrobial drugs. Lack of resistence was useless in cave man times.
> As we increase our interactions with animals through hunting, the trading of animal foods, animal husbandry practices, wet markets, and the domestication of animals or exotic pets, the probability of cross-species transmission dramatically increases.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874076/
Regardless of morals, the more animals we kill, the more pandemics we’re going to have.
The truly terrifying thing is that the reason fungi have not been a big threat to humans is that there was not evolutionary pressure for them to thrive in human body temperatures.
Now, due to the warming climate there is immense pressure. As fungi evolve to adapt to the warming climate, they are evolving to be able to infect and kill us.
Climate change was mentioned on "The Last of Us" episode 1, at the start. Aside from fictional references, there are fungi that can grow outside of 70-90F up to 130-150F. I believe COVID and people rushing to the hospital emergency room for everything instead of going to their PMC may have had something to do with this fungus finding purchase to infect more people.
Significant or not? <<many other factors may have contributed>>
<<The most enigmatic aspect of the rise of Candida auris as a human pathogen is that it emerged simultaneously on three continents, >>
I would be interested to know if COVID happened everywhere around the same time relatively speaking, with people self-quarantining while all running to the emergency room of hospitals, might explain the "enigma" above.
> The hypothesis that C. auris broke the mammalian thermal barrier through adaptation to climate change suggests several experimental lines of investigation to obtain evidence for and against it.
Nonetheless, they still cite to earlier papers (multiple!) of theirs to argue that they "predicted" their current speculative conclusion; for example,
> Given the capacity of fungal species to adapt to higher temperatures and the fact that many fungal species that are currently nonpathogenic species are likely to have the necessary virulence attributes by virtue of their survival in soils, we previously hypothesized that climate change would bring new fungal diseases
And in case anybody missed it (as I did, initially), the entire body of this "paper" is under the header, "OPINION/HYPOTHESIS".
But that wasn't when we were at our weakest, not necessarily. Diseases need to spread. When we lived in scattered hunter gatherer groups it was really tough for diseases to spread, and if they couldn't spread, it was difficult for them to persist in a population and evolve. Now the spreading is easy. Furthermore, spreading is easier among certain animal populations because we raise them packed into warehouses and we ship them around the world via truck, train, boat, and plane.
The world is a very different place, so using the past as a model to predict the future is dicey.
"International" trade has surely always existed - we know people far from the sea decorated their bodies with cowrie shells in prehistoric ages. But the scale of contact and interaction has not remained constant.
Arguably, the Middle Ages is when Eurasian society was at its weakest WRT disease.
It's estimated it wiped out 25-60% of the population of Europe over the course of 2 centuries (15-100 million people).
What makes you think this is unlikely? Even putting aside that bioengineering is a very real thing, there is historical precedent for terrible novel diseases (e.g. black death, Spanish flu).
I'll also point out that "humanity is totally wiped out" and "we're going to be fine" are not exhaustive. A disease killing 10% of the world's population would not be fine.
If a fungus could have already wiped out entire amphibian species, why didn't it to so before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chytridiomycosis