We have been warned: The planet’s health is our health
COVID-19 is only the beginning if we don’t change now.
“We underestimate the gift of a breath,” a friend recently commented. Life, health and death is on all our minds. We find ourselves indoors, isolated and lacking immunity.
Ahead of my own country’s draconian coronavirus lockdown, I went for a last walk along the city’s iconic promenade and took my time to note the ocean, the sky and us. Waves crashing, seagulls squawking, children playing. If I didn’t want to notice, the scene was soothing and full of beauty. But the signs were there. Plastic on the shores, sewage in the sea, and us — with our medical masks.
Too often we forget or perhaps struggle to understand that we live in a closed system, we share our environment with other organisms, and that the planet’s health is our health.
Illegal wildlife trade is not only to blame.
The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has been tentatively associated with a wet market in Wuhan, China where the sale of wild animals could be the source of animal infection. Studies of the virus genome suggest that the virus emerged in a colony of bats in southern China. Recent research published in Nature has identified coronaviruses that are related to SARS-CoV-2 in Malayan pangolins, obtained from anti-smuggling operations in southern China. In the study, the newly sequenced pangolin coronaviruses were 85–92% similar to SARS-CoV-2 and represent two sub-lineages of related coronaviruses.
Given the similarities between the genomes of bat and pangolin viruses it is suggested that these viruses found themselves in the same bat, pangolin or perhaps another animal, and shared genetic material to recombine to form the virus that became SARS-CoV-2. While not conclusive, pangolins are the likeliest intermediate vector yet.
What do we know about pangolins? Pangolins, found in Africa and Asia, are nocturnal, painstakingly shy and harmless. Pangolins are also the world’s most trafficked animal accounting for as much as 20% of all illegal wildlife trade. Between 2000 and 2019, at least 850 000 pangolins were trafficked internationally, and all eight species are threatened with extinction.
But now it seems possible that this persecuted animal has turned the tide on humans. The immediate response has been that all live wildlife markets around the world should be closed, illegal trade of wild animals stopped, and the consumption of wild animals prohibited. But as Wufei Yu argues in this New York Times article will that be enough? Is it not merely a band-aid on a much deeper wound? When has banning something ever stopped demand?
We feel stressed. So does nature.
Planetary health is the idea that human health and the health of the environment are inextricably linked and encourages the preservation and sustainability of natural systems for the benefit of human health.
An article recently published in Ensia highlights how the loss of habitat and biodiversity creates conditions for lethal new viruses and diseases like COVID-19 to spill into human communities. This is because the frequency and type of interactions between humans and other animals are greatly amplified. Also, because animals are increasingly stressed, and stress induces a greater release of a virus in the animals’ saliva, urine and faeces that can infect other animals.
If we cast a thought back to the pangolins in which the SARS-CoV-2-related viruses have been isolated, these were pangolins in the illegal wildlife trade sustaining enormous stress in their capture and transport, and in close proximity to other highly stressed wildlife species.
Mining, logging, slash and burn all encroach on the world’s tropical forests which are biodiversity hotspots. These hotspots have exceptional concentrations of endemic species and are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat. We already know that endangered species such as pangolins and chimpanzees harbour viruses that threaten human health, and in the case of the latter threaten the species itself but we continue to destroy the world’s forests at a rate of 26 million hectares a year.
The greatest rate of increase in Africa, where deforestation rates doubled from less than 2 million hectares a year to more than 4 million hectares a year. Africa is home to both pangolins and chimpanzees. What of the still undiscovered and undescribed species and animal pathogens? What threat do they pose as we fragment our landscapes and increase our contact?
We eat, drink, breathe plastic.
But let us not just focus our attention on biodiversity loss as this would fail humanity and our health as a global good. Researchers estimate that more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the early 1950s. About 60% of that plastic has ended up in either a landfill or the natural environment. According to UN Environment, we produce 300 million tonnes of plastic every year and more than half of all plastic produced is designed to be used only once and then thrown away. Around the world, a million plastic drinking bottles are purchased every minute, while up to 5 trillion single-use plastic bags are used every year.
The presence of microplastics in food, water and air destined for human consumption is widely reported. The health effects of ingestion and inhalation of microplastics are unknown, but it has been shown that microplastics accumulate and exert localised chemical toxicity. Not only that, research has exposed the distinct toxic risks plastic poses to human health at every stage of the plastic lifecycle, from extraction of fossil fuels, to consumer use, to disposal and beyond. Cancer, neurotoxicity, reproductive and developmental toxicity, impairment of the nervous system and immune system, cardiovascular disease and autoimmune conditions. Plastic is a human health crisis we do not want to see.
It’s not just COVID-19 that attacks our lungs, air pollution does too.
But it’s not just plastic, according to The Lancet diseases caused by pollution were responsible for 16% of all deaths worldwide, three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. The World Health Organisation estimates that 9 out of 10 people breathe air containing high levels of pollutants and around 7 million people die every year from exposure to fine particles in polluted air that penetrate deep into the lungs and cardiovascular system, causing diseases including heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases and respiratory infections, including pneumonia. Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels and biomass — including our biodiversity hotspot forests — which together account for 85% of airborne respirable particulate pollution and almost all sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. We are poisoning the air we breathe.
As hundreds of thousands of people around the world struggle to take a breath, it becomes clear we haven’t been listening. We need to pay attention now to our scientists, environmentalists and health practitioners who have been warning us for decades that we are running out of time. If we do not look after the health of the planet, it is not just the planet that suffers, but all of humanity too.
