Our environmental practices make pandemics like the coronavirus more likely. We’re going to lurch from disaster to disaster to disaster until we start to really change the fundamental relationship between us and nature”
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The story we tell about pandemics casts us as victims of nature. It’s the other way around. But what if we, the humans, are the ones staging the onslaught? What if the real story of modern pandemics is not about how animals and their germs are invading our human realm but about how we’re invading theirs?
That’s the argument of Sonia Shah, author of the 2017 book Pandemic. She says the paradigm of invasion — or “microbial xenophobia,” as she calls it — often fails to explain why a microbe that’s existed for ages suddenly turns into a pandemic-causing pathogen. After studying outbreaks ranging from cholera to West Nile virus to Ebola, she’s found that human activities play a huge, and hugely underrecognized, role.
Our environmental and social policies — like cutting down forests or failing to address a housing crisis — make it much likelier that a previously harmless microbe will cause a devastating outbreak.
Shah is not alone in advocating for a paradigm shift in how we understand pandemics. The One Health movement, an interdisciplinary way of thinking espoused by some global public health authorities, emphasizes the connections between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment. It’s pushing for this change, too.
I talked to Shah about how this approach can help us better understand the true origins of pandemics. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Sigal Samuel
The reigning narrative in a lot of people’s minds is that “exotic” animals are to blame for the coronavirus crisis — that they’re dirty and infested with tons of pathogens that just can’t wait to kill us. What’s wrong with this narrative?
Sonia Shah
First of all, we all have lots of microbes inside of us. Humans give animals microbes that turn into pathogens all the time, so we are also the source of disease for other species. But we don’t talk about that.
There’s a whole movement in global health called One Health. It’s the idea that human health is connected to the health of our animals — pets, livestock, wildlife — and our ecosystems and other societies. All these things are connected and we have to look at these broader drivers because that’s going to get to the root of the issue. Otherwise, we’re constantly just mopping up problems that are going to keep erupting again and again.
Read the whole story and follow the film on You tube.
That’s the argument of Sonia Shah, author of the 2017 book Pandemic. She says the paradigm of invasion — or “microbial xenophobia,” as she calls it — often fails to explain why a microbe that’s existed for ages suddenly turns into a pandemic-causing pathogen. After studying outbreaks ranging from cholera to West Nile virus to Ebola, she’s found that human activities play a huge, and hugely underrecognized, role.
Our environmental and social policies — like cutting down forests or failing to address a housing crisis — make it much likelier that a previously harmless microbe will cause a devastating outbreak.
Shah is not alone in advocating for a paradigm shift in how we understand pandemics. The One Health movement, an interdisciplinary way of thinking espoused by some global public health authorities, emphasizes the connections between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment. It’s pushing for this change, too.
I talked to Shah about how this approach can help us better understand the true origins of pandemics. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Sigal Samuel
The reigning narrative in a lot of people’s minds is that “exotic” animals are to blame for the coronavirus crisis — that they’re dirty and infested with tons of pathogens that just can’t wait to kill us. What’s wrong with this narrative?
Sonia Shah
First of all, we all have lots of microbes inside of us. Humans give animals microbes that turn into pathogens all the time, so we are also the source of disease for other species. But we don’t talk about that.
There’s a whole movement in global health called One Health. It’s the idea that human health is connected to the health of our animals — pets, livestock, wildlife — and our ecosystems and other societies. All these things are connected and we have to look at these broader drivers because that’s going to get to the root of the issue. Otherwise, we’re constantly just mopping up problems that are going to keep erupting again and again.
Read the whole story and follow the film on You tube.
Keywords
environmental awareness
environmental crisis
health impacts
hazard impacts
disasters
social implications
social protection
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- Our environmental practices make pandemics like the coronavirus more likely. We’re going to lurch from disaster to disaster to disaster until we start to really change the fundamental relationship between us and nature”
- Our environmental practices make pandemics like the coronavirus more likely. We’re going to lurch from disaster to disaster to disaster until we start to really change the fundamental relationship between us and nature”
- Our environmental practices make pandemics like the coronavirus more likely. We’re going to lurch from disaster to disaster to disaster until we start to really change the fundamental relationship between us and nature”