BOOK REVIEW:
War Communism? Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency

Tuesday 13 October 2020, by Simon Butler  

Andreas Malm 

CORONA, CLIMATE, CHRONIC EMERGENCY: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London, 2020.

There appears to be a big difference between capitalist governments’ collective response to the Covid-19 pandemic and their response to the climate emergency. Covid has prompted rapid, draconian inroads on the functioning of many businesses and even entire industries. In country after country, large parts of the economy have been shuttered and production has been redirected to social needs, such as personal protective equipment, hand sanitizers and ventilators.

There are obvious differences between countries, but many governments appear to have made uncharacteristic decisions that put human life and welfare ahead of profit making.

In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, Andreas Malm begins by asking why capitalist governments have seemingly been willing to pitch the world into recession to fight Covid, while they have been so resistant to calls to cut carbon pollution sharply. After all, Malm muses, “no champion of radical emissions cuts has ever asked people to submit to something as unpleasant as a lockdown.”

He offers several explanations for the seeming disparity. Unlike climate disruption, which is already hitting the global south first and hardest, Covid hit Western countries early on. Were Covid mainly confined to poorer countries it’s unlikely Western governments would have treated it as a global crisis. Covid also spread quickly, preventing capitalists from mounting a public relations campaign to defend their profits in the same way that the fossil fuel industry has financed climate change denial.

Another explanation for the difference is that capitalist states’ tough border restrictions and ‘war against the virus’ rhetoric fit neatly within conservative nationalist ideologies. The same cannot be said of radical action on climate change, which is internationalist by definition and requires the historically biggest polluters of the rich world to cut emissions the most.

Furthermore, while every oil or coal company, agribusiness giant and car-maker seeks to expand higher emissions is the business plan, Covid is not a direct product of the day-to-day functioning of the capitalist economy.

The state-led response to Covid is a sharp disruption to capital accumulation, but it is still a temporary measure. By contrast, climate action is forever, a serious response to climate change is a direct challenge to private property and the commodification of nature.
Global sickening

Malm argues that comparing the current Covid response with climate inaction is not comparing like with like. “The contrast between coronavirus vigilance and climate complacency is illusionary,” he says. Rather, “Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating.”

For many years, scientists have warned about the threat posed by rising “zoonotic spillover” — the process by which a virus can leap to humans from another species. Their warnings of potential pandemics have been ignored.

Outbreaks of new infectious diseases have been on the rise since the 1940s, accelerating to unprecedented heights after the 1980s. Most result from zoonotic spillover. Along with Covid, which originated with bats, other modern diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS and Zika also originated in animals.

Spillover is a higher risk today for several reasons. A major cause is the huge disruptions and encroachments made on natural environments, such as deforestation and urbanization. This brings wild animals in closer contact with human populations than before.

“That strange new diseases should emerge from the wild is, in a manner of speaking, logical: beyond human dominion is where unknown pathogens reside. But that realm could be left in some peace. If it weren’t for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn’t happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.”

The relentless commodification and caging of wild animals adds to the risk of zoonotic spillover. Modern livestock and aquaculture industries, which cram thousands of animals into confined spaces, are perfect breeding grounds for pathogens that can jump to humans.

Climate change itself is also disrupting animal populations. Warmer temperatures encourage them to migrate away from the equator, further increasing the chance of new interactions between animals and humans, and hence more zoonotic spillover.

Given this, Malm concludes that the response to Covid-19 has a lot in common with how capitalist states respond to other ecological problems — treating the symptoms while ignoring the causes.

“Ears have been as deaf to the science of spillover as to that of climate, if not more so. One might regard Covid-19 as the first boomerang from the sixth mass extinction to hit humanity in the forehead.”

The likelihood of similar, or even worse, pandemics coinciding with extreme climate change amount to a single “chronic emergency.”

Emergency and ‘war communism’

The final part of Malm’s book discusses the political responses and actions needed to truly address the root causes of this chronic emergency. Without decisive action we face a dangerous world of future pandemics colliding with immense ecological disasters. This means that the hope that gradual reforms will tame capitalism is less relevant than ever.

“Social democracy works on the assumption that time is on our side. But if catastrophe strikes, and if it is the status quo that produces it, then the reformist calendar is shredded.”

Malm also writes a chronic emergency obituary for anarchism, with its deep antagonism to the state. To get through the dire situation ahead and bring about the rapid changes needed, we will need state power on our side.

Nor is there any point holding on to dreams about “luxury communism” or vast material abundance under socialism. Even if we succeed in dismantling capitalism there’s no reason to think a society of lavishness and plenty will be possible on a planet impoverished by extreme climate heating and mass extinction.

Instead, the overriding priority is a project for dignified survival in a time of ominous emergency. Malm calls this project “ecological Leninism”, which he summarizes under three principles.

First, it “means turning the crises of symptoms into crises of the causes”, much like how Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to transform the outbreak of World War I into an opportunity to undermine the system that produced such horrible wars.

Second, “speed [is] a paramount virtue.” Given the state of the crisis, delay and half-measures are equal to welcoming disaster.

Third, ecological Leninism “leaps at any opportunity to wrest the state in this direction, break with business-as-usual as sharply as required and subject the regions of the economy working towards catastrophe to direct public control”.

The transition to a sustainable, ecologically sane society won’t look much like luxury communism. It will be more like “war communism” — a reference to the policies adopted by the Bolsheviks in early years of the Russian Revolution. In a time of civil war, facing near total economic collapse, a foreign blockade, and widespread famine, encircled by better armed and resourced enemies, the young worker’s state rapidly undertook widespread nationalisations of the economy. Against the odds, it survived the emergency and won the civil war.

Malm warns that his analogy is not to be taken literally. For instance, he says he no more endorses the most unsavoury aspects of War Communism than climate activists who use World War II analogies want to drop atomic weapons on Japan.

Instead, he is arguing for a planned emergency program of action, in which democratically-constituted state organizes and carries out the necessary steps to ensure human survival in a severely damaged planetary biosphere.

“Ecological war communism … means learning to live without fossil fuels in no time, breaking the resistance of dominant classes, transforming the economy for the duration, refusing to give up even if all the worst-case scenarios come true, rising out of the ruins with the force and the compromises required, organizing the transitional period of restoration, staying with the dilemma.”

Readers of Malm’s eloquent and important book need not agree that “war communism” is the best way to sum up the transitional measures needed to bring about an ecological society. I prefer plain ecosocialism myself — it carries a lot less baggage. But the great strength of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is that it gets the origins and the scale of the cascading ecological crises we face exactly right. Compared with most other books that discuss the crisis, its solutions are more realistic because they are more radical.

As Malm concludes, the measures he proposes “are exactly as utopian as survival.”

Source Climate & Capitalism.

Attached documents
war-communism-corona-climate-chronic-emergency_a6842.pdf (PDF - 363.2 kb)
Extraction PDF [->article6842]

Ecology and the Environment
Intersecting crises and the impact in Britain
Global Fever
Fires ravage Brazil’s wetlands
The Fires Currently Raging in California, and Climate Change
South African movement adopts Climate Justice Charter
Covid-19 Pandemic
Capitalism Made Women of Color More Vulnerable to the COVID Recession
Situation of Garment Factory Workers in Katunayaka – COVID-19 Update
Pandemic, Polarization, and Resistance in the US
Opening Up the Schools?
The crisis triggered by the pandemic and the economic policy of the European Union

Why the COVID origin report came up inconclusive

BY REID WILSON - 08/31/21 

© iStock/Madeline Monroe

The U.S. intelligence community was unable to reach a conclusion about the origins of COVID-19 after a 90-day review of available data and interviews with top health experts and officials.

If anyone was surprised about the inconclusive results, it was not those same health experts and officials. Those with experience hunting viruses in their natural habitats know just how difficult it is to track their origins.

Many had said from the beginning that there is insufficient evidence to pinpoint the moment in which the coronavirus infected its first human victim — and, based on experience with previous novel pathogens, the evidence is almost certain never to be found.

“It was obvious to many of us that based on the information they had, it was going to be incomplete,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Prevention at the University of Minnesota. “The level of information you need from the time that a spillover might have occurred or the time a leak might have occurred is in relatively short supply.”

The review by American intelligence agencies will be unsatisfying for everyone, whether they are inclined to believe the virus came from an animal known as a reservoir host and infected the first humans in a natural setting — something most health experts believe is the most likely explanation — or that the global pandemic is the result of a lab leak at a Chinese facility in Wuhan.

The Chinese government has not helped, either with the American review or a separate investigation undertaken by the World Health Organization, criticizing those inquiries as efforts to cast blame for a pandemic that has killed millions across the globe. But even with full cooperation, finding the true origin of the novel pathogen would have been highly unlikely.

“We will likely be left in suspension on this for years, unfortunately,” said Eric Topol, an expert in molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California.

The moment when a virus jumps from an animal to a human, known as a spillover event, is almost impossible to identify. If the virus itself is unknown to science before it infects its first victim, health care professionals do not have the ability to test for it; if the victim is treated in a hospital setting, the doctors do not know what they are looking at.

Even in retrospect, once a pathogen becomes a global public health threat, finding evidence of its origins rarely occurs. After half a century of occasional outbreaks in African nations, scientists have never firmly established the reservoir host of the Ebola virus, though a certain species of bat is the likeliest suspect. Decades of investigation have not uncovered the spillover event that started the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

More recently, Osterholm pointed to SARS, which killed at least 770 people in the early 2000s, or MERS, which killed at least 880 people a decade ago, mostly on the Arabian Peninsula.

In both cases, the viruses — also coronaviruses — much is known about how they spilled over into humans: SARS in China’s Guangdong Province, MERS from camels in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. But the exact moment of spillover in each case are events lost to history.

In the case of COVID-19, also known as the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there is evidence that the pathogen was circulating and infecting people months before the first recognized outbreak in Wuhan in late December. But there is no set of blood samples to test in hindsight, or evidence of widespread outbreaks of a particularly suspicious respiratory disease that might act as a blinking red light.

“We’ll never know. No one has test results from back then. No one has a smoking gun set of outbreaks,” Osterholm said. “This surely needs more study, and hopefully more info forthcoming from the Chinese lab experts, from the people involved in the community-based studies.”

Public health experts say the lack of conclusive evidence should not take away from the persistent threat of lab leaks, which exist around the world. Scientists in both the United States and Russia have been infected in the past with deadly diseases like Ebola because of accidental needle pricks and other causes.

“No matter what actually happened, it’s kind of besides the point,” said Tom Frieden, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama administration and now runs Resolve to Save Lives, the global health nonprofit.

“We know that lab accidents happen and we need a better global approach to reducing the risk,” Frieden said. “We know that spillover happens and we need a better global approach to reducing the risk. Not nearly enough is done on either of these. No matter what happened or didn’t happen in Wuhan, we need to do better at preventing both lab releases and spillover all over the world.”

Vampire bats make northward flight seeking stable climates

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VIRGINIA TECH

 

IMAGE: 

PAIGE VAN DE VUURST, A PH.D. STUDENT IN TRANSLATIONAL BIOLOGY, MEDICINE, AND HEALTH, CONDUCTS FIELD RESEARCH ON VAMPIRE BATS IN COLOMBIA THIS SUMMER.

view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF PAIGE VAN DE VUURST.

Vampire bats may soon take up residence in the United States and bring with them an ancient pathogen.

“What we found was that the distribution of vampire bats has moved northward across time due to past climate change, which has corresponded with an increase in rabies cases in many Latin American countries,” said Paige Van de Vuurst, a Ph.D. student in Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health Graduate Program. 

Van de Vuurst is the lead author of research recently published in the Ecography journal that predicts that vampire bats — currently only found in Mexico and Central and South America — are on the move with the United States being a viable home in 27 years. The findings concluded that with shifting seasonality — the differences in temperature between the coldest and warmest seasons — vampire bats have expanded their locations in search of more stable, temperate climates.

The research team, which included both undergraduate and graduate students, also found this expanded reach could be linked to a spillover of rabies. Vampire bats are known carriers of rabies, a disease known for its high mortality rates and often considered the oldest pathogen known by humans, dating back 3,000 years. 

Latin America is currently feeling the bite of the rabies spread through the loss of livestock, which has generated fear as the bats’ migration patterns expand. The Virginia Tech team aims to vigorously identify and track the bats by traveling to Colombia to help contain the spread to other countries, including the United States and its vital cattle industry. 

Why Colombia?

"Colombia is a mega-diverse country, making it a perfect natural laboratory," said Luis Escobar, assistant professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. The country boasts having the highest number of hummingbirds and bats, attributed to its tropic climate and proximity to the equator. 

Collaborating with three local universities – University of La Salle, Universidad Distrital, and Universidad del Tolima  –  the collective team traveled all across Colombia to collect more than 70 samples of bat species. This included a range of geographic and climate changes, starting in the hot and humid jungles to cold and cloudy parts of the Andes Mountains that are only accessible by cable car. This allowed the team to secure a variety of samples and observe how changes in climate can change the emergence of diseases in bats. 

The team also explored places in Colombia that were previously closed to scientists, including Chaparral, a municipality in the Tolima region  that was allowed to start welcoming tourists after the 2016 peace agreement.

The team’s research sought to address a knowledge gap that limits the understanding of the spread of rabies and its spillover from wildlife to humans. Their work had three primary aims:

• Determine the role of habitat and virus mutation on rabies spillover to humans and livestock across Latin America
• Identify the effect of changes in biodiversity in rabies virus spillover
• Investigate geographic and environmental factors influencing the spread of bat-borne

Sinking teeth into the experience

This field experience allowed four undergraduate and two graduate students to travel to Colombia.

“There is a sad reality in wildlife research at the moment that often mandates a ‘pay to play’ mentality, where students must pay for the experience of doing field work, especially international field work,” Van de Vuurst said.

All of the students' expenses, including travel, accommodations, and food, were supported through a National Science Foundation grant, Examining the Geography of Pathogen Spillover, awarded to Escobar, an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Anthropod-borne Pathogens and the Global Change Center. Van de Vuurst led the team’s campuswide recruitment efforts, yielding 30 interested students from across disciplines.

In advance of the trip to Colombia to study vampire bats, Escobar and his team met near the Duck Pond to review critical safety information and field sampling protocols.

“We selected a truly stellar group of students, and I could not be prouder of them,” said Van de Vuurst.

She was provided an opportunity as an undergraduate to go on an international excursion to Peru. “That trip changed my life, and really opened up the world of ecology for me. I am so glad that we were able to offer that same kind of once in a lifetime research experience to so many students through Luis' hard work and generosity.”

For undergraduate Julia Alexander, it was a series of firsts, including first field experience, first time on a plane, and first time out of the country. 

As part of the Escobar Lab’s research staff, Alexander was able to study disease transmission in vampire bats and other local bat species, working with local communities in the Tolima region. It was critically important for Escobar and Van de Vuurst to be able to offer the international research opportunity, knowing that undergraduate students are not usually able to participate in such an experience.

“I not only learned valuable field skills for my career, but also important life lessons from every challenge faced,” Alexander said. “Although this journey was not easy, I wouldn’t exchange the experience for anything else.”

Crossing borders to collaborate

The value of building a network of international collaboration cannot be understated, especially in terms of the commonalities  of technology, facilities, and students between Virginia Tech and their international partners.

In fact, Escobar is hosting Diego Soler-Tovar, assistant professor from Universidad La Salle, who will be working in the Escobar lab through late January 2024, to study the drivers of rabies spread in Latin America.

"We all have one goal: generating samples, new data, and new knowledge," Escobar said.

 

---

JOURNAL

Ecography

DOI

10.1111/ecog.06714 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Climate change linked to vampire bat expansion and rabies virus spillover

Experts: Pandemic prevention strategies far less costly than impact of outbreaks


The proposed strategies are intended to help political and public health leaders prevent future pandemics by stopping the "spillover" of diseases from animals into humans 

Photo by Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society | License Photo

Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Three strategies designed to prevent future pandemics would cost less than 5% of the lowest estimated value of lives lost every year due to infectious disease outbreaks, researchers said in an analysis published Friday by Science Advances.

The strategies are intended to help political and public health leaders prevent future pandemics by stopping the "spillover" of diseases from animals into humans, according to the researchers.

They include better surveillance of pathogens, better management of wildlife trade and hunting and reduced deforestation, they said.

The annual costs of what they call "primary pandemic prevention" actions is about $20 billion, or less than 5% of the lowest estimated value of lives lost from emerging infectious diseases every year and less than 10% of the annual economic costs of outbreaks, the data showed.

"If COVID-19 taught us anything, it is that testing, treatments and vaccines can prevent deaths, but they do not stop the spread of viruses across the globe and may never prevent the emergence of new pathogens," Dr. Aaron Bernstein, one of 20 researchers behind the analysis, said in a press release.

"Spending only 5 cents on the dollar can help prevent the next tsunami of lives lost to pandemics," said Bernstein, director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

About 3.3 million people worldwide die each year from viral zoonotic diseases like COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization.

Through Friday, 5.7 million people have died from COVID-19, including a world-leading 894,000 in the United States, based on estimates from Johns Hopkins University.

The estimated value of these lost lives is at least $350 billion, with an additional $212 billion in direct economic losses, Bernstein and his colleagues said.

This amount is based on lives lost from every new viral disease that has "spilled over," or spread from animals to humans into humans, since 1918 and killed at least 10 people, the researchers said.

In 2021, a task force led by Bernstein found that the spillover of pathogens with the potential to cause pandemics occur from livestock operations, wildlife hunting and trade, land-use change and the destruction of tropical forests and rapid, unplanned urbanization.

Climate change also is shrinking habitats and pushing animals on land and sea to move to new places, creating opportunities for pathogens to enter new hosts, the task force found.

Preventing spillover at the source is rarely addressed when policymakers discuss pandemic risks, despite the fundamental role these events play in spreading emerging infections, they said.

To address this, they recommend revising the World Health Organization's "phases of infectious disease emergence" guidance to include a specific phase for spillover.

They also coin a new term, "primary pandemic prevention," to describe actions that stop new diseases before they spread, rather than actions that address disease outbreaks after they occur, they said.

Primary prevention actions and recommendations include improved monitoring for pathogens that may spread from animals to people, with special training for veterinarians globally as part of that effort, according to the researchers.

Enhanced management of wildlife trade and hunting, including more resources for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and the World Organization for Animal Health, and reduction of deforestation, particularly in the Amazon, are others, they said.

As part of this latter step, agriculture must be reformed to minimize or reverse land conversion and demand for less sustainable food must also be curtailed, the researchers said.

"Resources placed into reducing deforestation are an investment to prevent future epidemics, but also to mitigate current threats, such as malaria and respiratory diseases," Marcia Castro Andelot, another of the researchers involved with the new report, said in the press release.

"Making these investments in prevention brings returns to human health, to the environment, and to economic development," said Andelot, a professor of demography and chair of global health and population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School.

BIRD TO MAMMAL SPILLOVER
Bird flu kills scores of sea lions in Argentina

Agence France-Presse
August 30, 2023, 

Animal health authorities have recently reported dead sea lions in several locations along Argentina's extensive Atlantic coast© Diego IZQUIERDO / TELAM/AFP

Scores of sea lions have died from bird flu in Argentina, officials said Tuesday, as an unprecedented global outbreak continues to infect mammals, raising fears it could spread more easily among humans.

Animal health authorities have recently reported dead sea lions in several locations along Argentina's extensive Atlantic coast, from just south of the capital Buenos Aires to Santa Cruz near the southern tip of the continent.

Another "50 dead specimens have been counted... with symptoms compatible with avian influenza," read a statement from a Patagonian environmental authority.

Authorities have asked the population to avoid beaches along Argentina's roughly 5,000-kilometer (3,100-mile) coastline where cases have been reported.

Sea lions are marine mammals, like seals and walruses. Adult males can weigh about 300 kilograms (660 pounds).

The H5N1 bird flu has typically been confined to seasonal outbreaks, but since 2021 cases have emerged year-round, and across the globe, leading to what experts say is the largest outbreak ever seen.

Hundreds of sea lions were reported dead in Peru earlier this year, as the virus has ravaged bird populations across South America.

There is no treatment for bird flu, which spreads naturally between wild birds and can also infect domestic poultry.

Avian influenza viruses do not typically infect humans, although there have been rare cases.

However, the outbreak has infected several mammal species, such as farmed minks and cats, and the World Health Organization warned in July this could help it adapt to infect humans more easily.


"Some mammals may act as mixing vessels for influenza viruses, leading to the emergence of new viruses that could be more harmful to animals and humans," the WHO said in a statement.

© 2023 AFP

Avma.org

https://www.avma.org/news/usda-tracking-bird-flu-spillover-events-mammals

USDA tracking bird flu spillover events in mammals 

Apr 24, 2023 ... The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is tracking cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) infection in mammals to better ...

Elifesciences.org

https://elifesciences.org/articles/86051

Viruses: How avian influenza viruses spill over to mammals -... 

Apr 11, 2023 ... The second way that spillover can happen involves a mammal getting directly infected with a bird virus (Figure 1B). This individual then ...

Thelancet.com

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00173-8/fulltext

Avian influenza spillover into mammals - The Lancet Microbe 

May 26, 2023 ... 4.4b has been circulating globally, leading to more than 50 million dead wild birds and culled poultry. Concerningly, the virus has also started ...

Coronavirus transmission risk increases along wildlife supply chains

by Public Library of Science
Malayan porcupine (Hystrix brachyura) farm in Dong Nai province, November 2013. Credit: Huong et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY)

Coronaviruses were detected in a high proportion of bats and rodents in Vietnam from 2013 to 2014, with an increasing proportion of positive samples found along the wildlife supply chain from traders to large markets to restaurants, according to a study published August 10 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Amanda Fine of the Wildlife Conservation Society and colleagues. As noted by the authors, the amplification of coronaviruses along the wildlife supply chain suggests maximal risk for end consumers and likely explains the coronavirus spillover to people.


Outbreaks of emerging coronaviruses in the past two decades and the current pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) highlight the importance of this viral family as a public health threat. Human-wildlife contact with a bat or an intermediate host species in China almost certainly triggered a coronavirus spillover event that may have involved wildlife markets and led to the pandemic spread of SARS-CoV-2, according to the latest scientific evidence. Beyond China, commercial wildlife farming in Vietnam is part of the expanded international wildlife trade that is thought to contribute to global epidemics, such as SARS and now coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by SARS-CoV-2.

To better understand the natural hosts of coronaviruses and the risk for these wildlife-human interfaces to facilitate spillover into humans, Fine and her collaborators investigated presence of viruses in the coronavirus family and diversity in wildlife at wildlife-human interfaces in Vietnam from 2013 to 2014 (years prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2).

They observed high proportions of positive samples of coronaviruses among field rats (34.0%, 239/702) destined for human consumption and bats in guano farms (74.8%, 234/313) adjacent to human dwellings. The odds of coronavirus detection increased along the supply chain, from field rats sold by traders (20.7%, 39/188), to field rats sold in large markets (32.0%, 116/363), and field rats served in restaurants (55.6%, 84/151). Coronaviruses were also detected in rodents on most wildlife farms sampled (60.7%, 17/28), affecting Malayan porcupines (6.0%, 20/331) and bamboo rats (6.3%, 6/96) raised for human consumption. To minimize the public health risks of viral disease emergence, the authors recommend improving coronavirus surveillance in wildlife and implementing targeted wildlife trade reform.

The authors add: "This study shows the wildlife supply chain generates a one-two punch when it comes to spillover risk. It is known to increase contact rates between wildlife and people and here we show how it greatly amplifies the number of infected animals along the way."


Explore further

Study finds that wildlife supply chains for human consumption increase coronavirus spillover risk to people
More information: Nguyen Quynh Huong et al, Coronavirus testing indicates transmission risk increases along wildlife supply chains for human consumption in Vietnam, 2013-2014, PLOS ONE (2020). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237129
Journal information: PLoS ONE
Provided by Public Library of Science

Researchers call for worldwide biosurveillance network to protect from diseases

Decentralized approach more cost-effective and efficient than current systems

SAN DIEGO ZOO GLOBAL

 

The emergence of COVID-19 is a powerful reminder of how unchecked wildlife trade can lead to the spillover spread of viruses between wildlife and humans. Understanding that wholesale bans on trade can affect community livelihoods and food security, the pandemic underscores the need for widespread pathogen screening and monitoring to better understand, predict and contain outbreaks in wildlife and humans.

To date, global biosurveillance has consisted of centralized efforts led by governmental and specialized health agencies. A group of authors--including eight researchers from San Diego Zoo Global--writing in the journal Science this week offer an efficient approach that may be more resilient to fluctuations in government support and could be utilized even in remote areas.

Given the importance for the health of a global population, the team of scientists recommend a "decentralized" disease surveillance system, enabled by modern pathogen-detection methods, which builds in-country capacity for addressing challenges. Utilizing portable molecular screening that is both cost-effective and relatively easy to use, this network would take a more fundamentally proactive approach to wildlife screening, they write.

"The COVID-19 crisis has shown that the international wildlife trade is a global system in need of greater oversight," said Elizabeth Oneita Davis, Ph.D., conservation social scientist in Community Engagement at San Diego Zoo Global, who was one of the authors. "However, ill-conceived measures such as 'blanket bans' could affect millions of people and drive these activities deeper underground, further impeding our efforts to understand and reduce demand for wildlife."

The network should expand monitoring beyond human disease outbreaks to encompass a broader understanding of pathogens and evaluate their spillover risk (of spreading from wildlife to humans or vice versa), they write. To this end, surveillance focal points should include wildlife markets and farms, as well as free-ranging populations of "high-risk" wildlife.

"Since the H1N1 outbreak of 2009, which spurred governmental responses such as PREDICT to begin active virus hunting in zoonotic hotspots, genomic technologies have transformed radically," said Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa, Ph.D., lead author and conservation geneticist on San Diego Zoo Global's Population Sustainability team. "Sequencing the genome of a virus is now feasible on miniature sequencers, directly at the point of sample collection. Today, we can more directly and powerfully survey wildlife health, identify areas of high spillover potential and contribute to minimizing those behaviors, to keep human and wildlife populations safe," she said.

Key to this approach is the creation of a pathogen database to provide early warnings of spillover potential, and assist in containment and development of therapeutic treatments.

"A decentralized approach to biosurveillance would more readily address wildlife and ecosystem health, and therefore conservation as a whole," said Steven V. Kubiski, DVM, Ph.D., a veterinary pathologist on San Diego Zoo Global's Disease Investigations team, who co-authored the perspective piece. "The ability to test multiple populations is just the beginning--a centralized location for deposition, analysis and reporting would add even more value, and could serve as an open-access resource."

The authors note that beyond endangering human health, emerging infectious diseases can imperil wildlife populations that have not evolved resistance to unfamiliar pathogens.

Additionally, the authors call for an internationally recognized standard for wildlife trade, the risks of which they call the "largest unmet challenge" for infectious disease surveillance. Despite the known risks, little monitoring takes place in wildlife markets like the one believed to be the original vector of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

"Decentralized pathogen screening in wildlife lends itself not only to early detection of pathogen spillover into humans, but helps conservation veterinarians and disease experts understand the natural host-pathogen relationship, allowing us to better conserve wildlife populations and save species," said Caroline Moore, DVM, Ph.D., Steel Endowed Pathology Fellow and veterinary toxicologist on San Diego Zoo Global's Disease Investigations team, who was among the co-authors.

"The proposed disease surveillance model will help us inventory naturally occurring pathogens in different taxa across the globe, enabling us to track future changes in viruses and ecosystem health that are relevant to both humans and wildlife populations," added Carmel Witte, Ph.D., wildlife epidemiologist on San Diego Zoo Global's Disease Investigations team.

The authors point out the value of biobanking efforts, including those of San Diego Zoo Global's Frozen Zoo®, in assisting the worldwide surveillance effort.

This decentralized system is consistent with the collaborative, holistic disease mitigation strategy of the One Health approach, used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This approach seeks to decrease the threat of disease through the conservation of nature and ecosystem function, accounting for domestic animals and all other human-related factors.

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About San Diego Zoo Global

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Climate change linked to risk of viruses jumping species in the Arctic environment

 27 August 2021

By Adam Vaughan

Lake Hazen base camp on Ellesmere Island

Wolfgang Kaehler / Alamy Stock Photo

Climate change may increase the risk of viruses becoming capable of infecting new hosts in the Arctic, suggests a study of genetic material from a Canadian lake.

Canadian scientists found that an increase in glacier melt at Lake Hazen, the Arctic’s largest lake by volume and a location in George Clooney’s film The Midnight Sky, was linked to a greater risk of viral spillover, where a virus infects a new host for the first time. Melting glaciers were considered a proxy of climate change, which is causing their retreat globally.

The team from the University of Ottawa, led by Audrée Lemieux, gathered soil and sediment from the lake and sequenced the RNA and DNA in the samples. The researchers found signatures of viruses and their potential hosts including animals, plants and fungi. They then ran an algorithm recently developed by a different research team, which assesses the chance of coevolution or symbiosis among unrelated groups of organisms. The algorithm allowed the team to gauge the risk of spillover, and suggested this was higher in lake samples nearer to the point where larger tributaries – carrying more meltwater from nearby glaciers – flow into the lake.

“Our main finding is we show that for this specific lake, the spillover risk increases with the melting of glaciers. It’s not the same thing as predicting pandemics – we’re not crying wolf,” says Lemieux.

She says the risk of infectious diseases emerging from the Arctic is low today due to the region’s paucity of “bridge vectors”, such as mosquitoes, that can spread viruses to other species. However, the researchers note that climate change not only melts glaciers, but is also expected to cause more species to move towards the poles, which they warn “could have dramatic effect in the High Arctic”.

Read more: A deadly seal virus may be spreading faster due to melting Arctic ice

Exactly how glacier melt might increase spillover risk isn’t entirely clear from simply running the algorithm. Co-author Stéphane Aris-Brosou says one idea is that extra run-off simply increases the mixing of species because their local environment is disturbed, physically bringing together viruses and potential new hosts that wouldn’t otherwise encounter each other.

Most of the viruses found were plant and fungal ones. Other researchers question how many would be sufficiently intact, or in high enough concentrations, to remain infectious. “Much of the fragmented DNA or RNA they find will represent degraded viral genomes that no longer present a risk,” says Alex Greenwood at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany.

Lemieux and Aris-Brosou say another caveat is that this is the first time the spillover algorithm has been used in this way, so more studies will be needed to calibrate the true risk.

The threat of diseases emerging from the Arctic due to a warming world came to the fore in 2016 with a deadly anthrax outbreak in people in Siberia linked to the thawing of frozen ground uncovering a long-dead infected reindeer. “Are there potentially new viruses that the melting of the permafrost is going to wake up? As scientists, we ought to know, but we are really into the unknown unknowns,” says Aris-Brosou. Lemieux is now studying the team’s data to see if she can identify new viruses.

Reference: bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2021.08.23.457348

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Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2288529-climate-change-linked-to-risk-of-viruses-jumping-species-in-the-arctic/#ixzz74tt1vPTO

ZOONOSIS

Fuzzy, Cute, and ... Viral? Bats A Likely Source Of Future Pandemics

William A. Haseltine
FORBES
Jan 20, 2024


Flying bat hunting in forest. The grey long-eared bat (Plecotus austriacus) is a fairly large ... [+]GETTY

One of the many lessons from our —ongoing— battle with Covid-19 is that viral transfer from wild animals to humans, known as zoonosis, is a very real threat. And this isn’t the first time it’s happened: SARS-CoV-1, AIDS, and Ebola can all be put into the same category. Indeed, roughly 60% of epidemics can be traced back to an animal origin. The thing is, the sources of zoonotic diseases aren't always “exotic” animals that only infrequently come into contact with humans. One of the major zoonotic culprits is markedly more quotidian: bats. Viral spillover from these furry vampires leads to higher fatality rates than spillover events from other animals. Why is that? A new study published in PLOS Biology suggests it may all be in the wings.

Predicting Animal Spillovers

Although entirely preventing zoonotic spillovers will be difficult, we can strive to strengthen our public health systems to help minimize the effect of future occurrences. A key part of this process is honing our understanding of the threats. Which animal populations present the largest risk? Which taxonomic orders give rise to the most virulent viruses? In effect, where should we be looking?

One shorthand approach has been to focus on phylogenetic relationships, which describe how closely or how distantly different animals are related to one another based on their evolutionary history. In general, spillover events across animal orders that are more distantly related to one another lead to high viral virulence. Note that increased viral virulence doesn’t always mean increased overall mortality: if a virus is too virulent, it kills off its host before it has a chance to transmit to a new host. This is known as trade-off theory. So, the animal populations most likely to saddle us with virulent viruses are not necessarily those most likely to saddle us with pandemics. Still, as evidenced by Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, unlikely and impossible are two different things.

Though a useful heuristic, phylogenetic relationships don’t completely predict the virulence of spillover events. Think of it as a very coarse sieve — it filters out the largest debris but fails to capture a lot of the smaller particles. The researchers, by collecting data from a large number of spillover studies and generating a statistical model, set out to provide a finer sieve. In particular, they wanted to pinpoint the features of bat immune systems that predispose them to becoming viral reservoirs. Other animals with similar immune systems, it would stand to reason, may pose a similar risk.

Flight and Inflammation: What’s the Connection?

Bats are masters at hosting viruses while remaining mostly unaffected by their presence. This includes viruses which, in other animals, would usually cause serious disease or death. They are also extremely adept at keeping viral load —the total amount of virus present in an organism— low. In some sense, bats are perfect viral incubators; they provide viruses with a home to reproduce and evolve, all free of charge. That’s why bat viruses that make the transition into human hosts are often so deadly, they’ve had years to improve overall fitness.

How is it that the bats themselves are not affected by the viruses? Well, bats are the only winged mammals — all other animals of flight are either insects or birds. And flight is not an easy thing. It is extremely taxing at the metabolic level, requiring a great deal of effort and energy. So much so that it causes oxidative stress, which happens when oxygen-containing molecules build up more quickly than the body’s ability to break them down. Left unaddressed, this can cause DNA damage and chronic inflammation. But if every time a bat took flight its inflammatory response kicked in, it would be in a constant state of inflammation. This is, of course, far from optimal. A little inflammation is crucial to healing, yes, but too much of it will end up harming otherwise healthy tissues and organs. To avoid this, bats seem to have developed a heightened tolerance for inflammation. In short, it takes a great deal to trigger a bat’s inflammatory response.

At the genetic level, these adaptations are reflected by decreased activation or wholesale loss of many of the genes associated with inflammation. These include heavy hitters like NLRP3 (NLR family pyrin domain containing 3) and other genes involved in an important inflammatory signaling pathway called NF-κB (nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells)

So while the increased tolerance to inflammation likely evolved to help bats fly, it also had the added benefits of boosting their longevity —bats are extraordinarily long-lived relative to their body size— and of letting them come away from viral infections mostly unscathed. Combined, this makes bats an excellent breeding ground for new viruses: their inflammatory response is rarely triggered by circulating viruses, giving the viruses a chance to replicate and mutate undisturbed. And since bats aren’t usually affected by the viruses they carry, the viruses can crank up the dial on virulence without fear of killing their hosts. A foolproof recipe for dangerously fit viruses.

Bats and Antiviral Genes

A recent study also discovered that horseshoe bats lack an antiviral variant of a gene called OAS1 (2'-5'-oligoadenylate synthetase 1). In humans, the OAS1 gene comes in two different forms, one short and the other long. During the height of the pandemic, researchers noticed that the majority of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 carried the shorter variant of the gene. Follow-up experiments revealed that the longer variant of the gene included vital information that helped carriers’ immune systems identify and destroy the RNA of SARS-CoV-2.

How? The protein produced by the longer gene variant carries a signal that allows it to be modified by the addition of a fat molecule, a process called prenylation. The addition of the fat molecule lets the OAS1 protein associate with cellular membranes. A common tactic employed by SARS-CoV-2, and other such viruses, is to “cloak” itself in a specialized replication compartment called a double-membrane vesicle. This compartment allows the virus to hide its RNA from our immune system. The longer version of OAS1, however, cuts through this viral tactic; by binding to cellular membranes, it can penetrate the replication compartment, locate the viral RNA, and sound the alarm bells.

As it turns out, horseshoe bats lack the protective version of the gene. At some point in time, they “lost” the variant to evolution. Instead, they only have the shorter version, which doesn’t offer any antiviral benefits. Why the bats lost the protective variant of the gene remains unclear, and what the current version of the gene does is equally unknown. A reasonable guess would be that the loss of the protective variant is part of the general trend towards an increased tolerance of inflammation, but more work needs to be done to piece together this particular puzzle.

Takeaways

This study provides us with a new, more fine-tuned way of predicting future viral spillover events. In particular, it helps direct our gaze to those mammals most likely to saddle us with highly virulent viruses. By studying bats, a well-known source of zoonotic outbreaks, the researchers managed to pinpoint key features that prefigure the evolution of quickly replicating viruses: hosts with protracted lifespans for their body size, which often indicates a heightened tolerance for inflammation, and hosts with strong constitutive immune responses. Viral tolerance, which is the ability to be exposed to high viral loads without suffering health consequences, is especially relevant to the development of virulent viruses.

The findings also raise an interesting question regarding the role and helpfulness of inflammation. Clearly, some degree of inflammation is necessary for successful immune function, but if bats are anything to go by, the less inflammation the better. Despite being chock full of viruses, they often suffer no adverse health effects. They also live long and healthy lives. Indeed, persistent inflammation is considered a hallmark of aging in humans. Excessive inflammation is also linked to numerous disorders in humans. Perhaps the bats are onto something.

Of course, as is the case for any model, we need to take the results with a grain of salt. A model is only as accurate as the data it is based on. The more data, and the better the quality of the data, the better the predictions of the model. Still, the model the researchers generated has provided useful hypotheses that can now be experimentally tested, both in cell culture and in vivo.

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William A. Haseltine

I am a scientist, businessman, author, and philanthropist. For nearly two decades, I was a professor at Harvard