The map shows emerging diseases around the world

Here’s the most depressing map you’re likely to see this week, courtesy of Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The map, featured in a recent article co-authored by Fauci, shows the many other emerging diseases besides covid-19 that pose a threat to our health.

The paper, released over the weekend, as a prepublication in the journal Cell (meaning it can be revised before its final publication), is intended to expose the environmental and human factors that led to the outbreak of covid- 19 on the world stage at the end of 2019. Co-authored by Fauci is David Morens, Senior Science Advisor in the Office of the Director of NIAID. It’s an educational read, which explores how new, emerging diseases like covid-19 and familiar enemies like the flu can become so dangerous for humanity.

Viruses like the flu, for example, quickly turn into new strains that can easily swap genes with other flu viruses and capture the right mix of genetic stuff that makes them more deadly than seasonal flu and helps them spread. widely from person to person. . Coronaviruses aren’t that erratic, but their ability to infect a wide variety of host species makes them more likely to spread to humans – and that’s the main theory behind how covid-19 came into play .

In fact, it’s more than possible, Fauci and Morens note, that the common cold coronaviruses we have today once caused major and fatal outbreaks in the past. While this may provide some comfort, given that these viruses are now relatively harmless, not all dangerous viruses become more tame over time, and those that often take a long time to calm down.

This brings us to the aforementioned map, a comprehensive but by no means complete illustration of emerging and re-emerging diseases that have recently caused us problems or are still distressing us (the danger of armed anthrax is highlighted as a “deliberately emerging” disease). Many of them are not particularly susceptible to becoming a pandemic, at least for now. Ebola, for example, is very fatal but remains relatively difficult to transmit between people. Bacterial diseases like gonorrhea are worrisome because they become resistant to antibiotics, but they are not particularly fatal.

Far from being an extremely rare event, however, humanity has experienced a pandemic on average every 20 years for the past hundred years, the last one, the H1N1 flu, appearing 10 years ago.

None of this is to say that we are powerless against the coming tide of germs – there is a lot we can do to prepare, and in fact, a lot of people have predicted that something like covid-19 will happen. as recently as last October. But without learning from our mistakes this time around, it’s impossible to say how bad the next pandemic will be.

“Science will certainly provide us with many life-saving medicines, vaccines and diagnostics; however, there is no reason to believe that these alone can overcome the threat of increasingly frequent and deadly infectious disease emergencies, ”wrote Fauci and Morens. “Covid-19 has been among the loudest wake-up calls for over a century. It should force us to start thinking seriously and collectively about living in a more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature, even as we foresee the inevitable and always unexpected surprises of nature.