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By APD writer Alice
The rapid pace of urbanization and population booming are two of the major causes for the spread of infectious diseases across Asia, including the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Rapid urbanization is happening throughout Asia and the Pacific regions, where 60% of the world already lives. According to the World Bank, almost 200 million people moved to urban areas in East Asia during the first decade of the 21st century. The mass movement of people to East Asia’s cities was the equivalent size of the world’s sixth-largest country.
Migration on that scale means forest land is destroyed to create residential areas. Wild animals, forced to move closer to cities and towns, inevitably encounter domestic animals and the human population. Wild animals often harbor viruses; bats, for instance, can carry hundreds of them. And viruses, jumping species to species, can ultimately infect people.
Eventually, extreme urbanization becomes a vicious cycle: More people bring more deforestation, and human expansion and the loss of habitat ultimately kills off predators, including those that feed off rodents. With the predators gone – or at least with their numbers sharply diminished – the rodent population explodes. And as studies in Africa show, so does the risk of zoonotic disease.
The UNEP said in a 2016 report that expanding populations and worsening climate-change impacts are putting greater pressure on the land, with deforestation, urbanisation, intensifying agriculture, and resource extraction providing more opportunities for pathogens to spill over from animals to people.
About 60% of infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic, with land-use changes and shifts in the agricultural industry - including more intense cultivation - being primary drivers, it said.
"Land-use change, such as the building of roads or cities where once there were forests, creates a chain reaction of ecological, socio-economic, human, and regional fauna impacts," said Karen Saylors, chief executive of Labyrinth Global Health, a Florida-based research organisation.
Urbanisation has led to greater population densities in cities, increasing the potential for large infectious disease outbreaks, she added.
This is particularly true of Asia, where crowded cities are often poorly planned and widening inequality increases their vulnerability to disease outbreaks in terms of preparedness and response.
"Human health is connected to animal health, but also to the health of forests," said David Ganz, executive director of non-profit The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC) in Bangkok.
"Strengthening the land rights of local people through people-centred forestry can reduce the risks of viral epidemics driven by deforestation," Ganz said.
About 134,000 people worldwide have been infected by coronavirus, which emerged in China late last year, and nearly 5,000 died.
Coronaviruses are zoonotic diseases or zoonoses - meaning they are passed from animals to humans. Other examples include the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that was transmitted from civet cats, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome that was passed from camels, as well as Ebola and bird flu.
"Diseases passed from animals to humans are on the rise, as the world continues to see unprecedented destruction of wild habitats by human activity," said Doreen Robinson, chief of wildlife at the UNEP.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
