Growth is the only way a disease could cause extinction

*Growth bad – urbanization, travel, globalization, trade in foreign animals

*Vaccination & international coop fails

Perrings et al. 17

(Charles, professor of Environmental Economics in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, “Economic growth, urbanization, globalization, and the risks of emerging infectious diseases in China: A review,” February 2017, Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 18–29, #GoTigers)

Today, an increasingly urban and interconnected world faces growing threats from emerging infectious diseases (McMichael 2004; Kapan et al. 2006; Bradley and Altizer 2007). This is of particular concern in the developing world, where managing fast-spreading epidemics in the growing number of megacities is a pressing challenge (Rees 2013). Recent epidemics have underscored the importance of linkages between host habitats and the global network of cities. The Ebola virus, for example, has long survived among wildlife reservoirs in the hinterlands of Africa, ‘‘breaking out’’ in towns and cities in conspicuous but otherwise local epidemics. As in earlier outbreaks, the 2014 epidemic is thought to have origins in the consumption of wild animal protein, while its spread occurred in densely populated African cities. The international threat it posed stemmed from the increasing air travel connections between these and other cities around the world. In the case of arboviruses like Zika, dengue, chikungunya, West Nile, and malaria, whose vectors have found ready habitat in urban areas, the primary mechanism for the spread of disease from one city to the next is international trade and travel (Hay et al. 2005; Tatem et al. 2006; Alirol et al. 2011; Weaver 2013; Kraemer et al. 2015). The same is true of coronaviruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The latter emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012, having been transmitted between animal reservoirs such as camels and their human handlers. It has since spread throughout the surrounding region, and travel-related human infections have been recorded in Europe, North America, and East and Southeast Asia (Parlak 2015; Zumla et al. 2015). Urbanization and globalization have made outbreaks of these diverse zoonoses difficult to control, even with unprecedented levels of international cooperation (Khan et al. 2013; Weaver 2013; Chan 2014; Kraemer et al. 2015). For most emerging infectious diseases, prevention is better than cure—ex ante mitigation of disease risk is more economically efficient than ex post adaptation to an outbreak (Murphy 1999; Graham et al. 2008; Voyles et al. 2014; Langwig et al. 2015). Among mitigation strategies, vaccination has been a widespread and long-established practice for many DNA viruses such as chicken pox or small pox. However, vaccination remains problematic for most RNA viruses, including Ebola, SARS, and avian influenza, due to their higher mutation rate; vaccination is simply not a feasible way to prevent the emergence of many novel zoonoses, which will inevitably encounter immunologically native populations. Therefore, mitigating the risks from emerging and reemerging zoonoses requires preemptive measures against their socioecological drivers (Pike et al. 2014). Identifying areas where the convergence of risk factors is occurring with greatest intensity, and at the largest scales, is a logical first step in the development of a mitigation strategy. In this regard, China may be an important outlier among countries. Assessment of the risks posed by zoonotic diseases requires an understanding of how socioeconomic, and ecological conditions affect two phenomena: emergence (the irruption of a pathogen originating in wildlife or livestock into human populations) and spread (the transmission of disease among both animals and people). In this article, we review the evidence for changes in zoonotic risks in China. More particularly, we show how income growth, urbanization, and globalization affect the likelihood of emergence and spread, using SARS and avian influenza as topical and representative examples, but also referring to other diseases when relevant. We discuss the policy implications of changes in the epidemiological environment in China, and consider how the mitigation of zoonotic risk in China could benefit the global risk environment. China’s rate of economic growth over the last 25 years has been exceptional. Real per-capita GDP (in purchasing power parity terms) rose from 1516 USD in 1990 to 12 608 USD in 2014, an average annual growth rate of over 9 %. While this has generated the resources necessary to improve biosecurity and healthcare, it has also increased the likelihood of disease emergence and transmission. The presence of major migratory bird pathways (conduits for the transmission of influenzas), habitats that encourage mixing between wild and domesticated birds, and a dramatic increase in demand for fresh meat have increased the likelihood of disease emergence. At the same time, urbanization and the growth of international trade and travel have increased the likelihood of disease spread (Wang et al. 2008; Alirol et al. 2011; Zhu et al. 2011; Gong et al. 2012; Li et al. 2012a, b). In 1990, only one quarter of China’s population lived in cities; today, over 54 % are urban residents, and by 2030 there will be at least one billion city-dwellers, or 70 % of the population (Peng, 2011). Concurrently, China’s integration into international networks of trade and travel has occurred rapidly. Between 1990 and 2015, China’s exports to the rest of the world grew annually by around 17 %, and although exports in this period were dominated by manufactures, exports of food and live animals grew at an only slightly lower rate. More importantly for China’s exposure to global disease risk, imports of food and live animals were 7–8 times larger than exports in 1990, and have since grown by around 15 % year (World Bank 2016).