After living through COVID-19, it’s safe to say that most of us wouldn’t want to experience pandemic lockdowns again. Yet, research published in the Nature journal this week indicates that humans are contributing to a recent rise in infectious diseases.
No, we’re not talking about eating exotic animals. We’re talking about climate change.
According to the new study from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., “anthropogenic (that means related to the influence of human beings) change is contributing to the rise in emerging infectious diseases, which are significantly correlated with socioeconomic, environmental and ecological factors.”
“We explored climate change, biodiversity loss, introduced species, urbanization, chemical pollution, and we found that many of these changes to the planet are increasing infectious disease responses,” said study leader and Notre Dame biologist Jason Rohr, according to Audacy’s KCBS Radio in San Francisco.
In the study, Rohr demonstrated that a reduced diversity of living organisms may be the main driver of infectious diseases, per a university press release. Other major drivers he identified were the introduction of non-native species, climate change and chemical pollution.
“This study is particularly important because we knew that infectious diseases were on the rise and that humans were profoundly modifying the environment, but we did not know which global change drivers most increased or decreased infections and under what contexts, and thus disease control efforts were partially flying blind,” said Rohr. “This study now provides greater guidance on the conditions that are associated with both increases and decreases in infectious diseases of plants, animals, and humans.”
To gather the data featured in the study, Rohr and his fellow researchers analyzed a dataset of 3,000 observations from scientific literature penned in eight different languages. While they found that climate change and a lack of biodiversity contributed to infectious disease growth, they also found that urbanization reduced disease.
“The findings uncovered by this meta-analysis should help target disease management and surveillance efforts towards global change drivers that increase disease,” said the study. It went on to say that: “Specifically, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing ecosystem health, and preventing biological invasions and biodiversity loss could help to reduce the burden of plant, animal and human diseases, especially when coupled with improvements to social and economic determinants of health.”
Rohr and his team were supported in their research by the U.S. National Science Foundation. In its own press release on the findings, the foundation said that it is “becoming increasingly important” to understand the factors that contribute to infectious disease, including the potential role humans might have in that spread.
Infectious diseases can impact humans by making them sick. It can also impact animals, and plants that have a significant impact on global food security.
“The fact that many global change drivers increase parasites of humans in non-human animals and increase all parasites in wild animals suggests that environmental change might increase the occurrence of parasite spillover from animals to humans and, therefore, also pandemic risk,” Rohr, who is affiliated with the Eck Institute of Global Health, explained.
Just this week, Audacy reported that 24% of the world’s population (an estimated 1.5 billion people) are infected with parasitic worms. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a current independent candidate for president in the U.S., also confirmed this week that doctors told him a parasitic worm infection had impacted his brain.