Diseases causes extinction – outbreaks can easily spread and are only exacerbated by deforestation. Assumes COVID.

Although it has been a novel experience for most people living through it, the COVID-19 pandemic was not an unanticipated event. In fact, a respiratory virus-enabled pandemic like COVID-19 was deemed likely or even expected by virologists. The interconnectedness of modern-day civilisation has made it much easier for a pandemic to spread globally in days or weeks rather than months, and the frequency of outbreaks is accelerated by ecosystem collapse, demographic developments and global warming. In any given month, The World Health Organization now traces roughly 7.000 signals of potential outbreaks, conducts 300 follow-ups, and leads 30 investigations. In the month of June 2018, for the first time ever, the WHO tracked outbreaks of six of the eight of the ’priority communicable diseases’, like Zika and MERS happening at the same time. WHO’s list of potential outbreaks also includes ‘Disease X’, representing the fact that a future epidemic or pandemic could also be caused by a pathogen unknown to us at the current time. Below, we take a closer look at some of the global trends that will accelerate the emergence and spread of disease in the future. The rise of megacities The transition from rural to urban life is a defining characteristic of our age. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s 9,8 billion people will live in urban areas, up from around half of the world population living in cities today. This movement of people from the countryside to cities is driven by the promise of increased economic opportunity, access to healthcare, connections, education, and increased mobility. During the next decade, the number of megacities (defined as 10 million inhabitants or more) will increase to 39 by adding Chicago, Bogota, Luanda, Chennai, Baghdad, and Dar es Salaam to the list. With more than 80% being in low- or middle-income countries, megacities with large parts of the populations living in slums heightens the risk of disease spreading effortlessly. Novel outbreaks will have fertile ground for spreading exponentially, as seen in metropoles and travel hubs of today like New York City. The megacities of the future will be densely populated hubs for transnational commerce, mobility, and hyper-connected which all amplify pandemic risk. With the growing risk of pandemics occurring in the future, the need to bolster the pandemic resilience of cities will only get more pressing. Researchers at the Senseable City Lab at MIT offer a glimpse into some of the features of the pandemic-proof city of the future. As part of their project named ‘Underworlds’, they placed sensors in sewers to detect concentrations of illegal drugs and harmful bacteria in specific areas. The researchers propose to develop a new kind of human health census by sampling the ‘urban gut’ and thus providing early signals of things like contagious disease with geographical precision. A city built with lessons from pandemics might be filled with systems such as these to help map the spread of disease. While technology can get us some of the way, it can’t solve some of the more structural issues that lie at the heart of why and how outbreaks of disease become epidemics or pandemics. Outbreaks of disease tend to hit underprivileged or marginalised population groups the hardest, and to effectively curb the spread of disease in the future, we not only need to expand our urban and technological resilience, but arguably (and chiefly) our social and community resilience as well. Global warming and increased human-wildlife interfacing Pandemics and global warming remind us that nature is powerful, and that despite all our modern gadgets, we are still subject to its temperaments. Our current situation is a terrifying harbinger of the pandemics that can be brought about in the future if global warming continues to further destabilise the natural world. Already today, global warming is exposing new threats. The warming planet is melting permafrost that has been frozen for decades or longer, releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that have lain dormant. Out of the meltwater, smallpox or the Spanish flu could be given a second chance, or something completely different we do not want to discover could be ‘released’ into the world. Rising global temperatures are also expanding the geographical reach of diseases like zika, dengue fever, and malaria, as these infectious diseases and their vectors, like mosquitos, thrive better in a warmer and a more humid climate. Additionally, global warming is also changing the water cycle, leading to heavier rainfalls and higher risks of floods, and consequently spreading water-borne diseases like cholera. This is especially problematic in the world’s poorest regions which are unable to invest heavily in climate mitigation infrastructure.