\n \n \n “. concat(self. i18n. t(‘search. voice. recognition_retry’), “\n
In thirteen years as an infectious disease doctor in the suburbs of New York City, Azfar Chak has battled viruses, both common and rare. But I had never experienced a summer of viruses like this. No one had done it, at least in this component of the world.
A third year of the coronavirus, transmitted through a more contagious variant. Global epidemics of monkeypox and mysterious hepatitis are affecting healthy children in the past. The polio virus was discovered in the sewage systems of London and New York. And polio was diagnosed in patients in Jerusalem and Rockland County where Chak works, a domain of more than 300,000 people north of New York City.
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the ultimate and compelling stories of the Washington Post.
The return of polio, one of the most feared diseases in the early 1950s, is puzzling. In the 800-page medical journal Chak recently read to prepare for recertification, he found that “there is almost no mention of polio. “almost eradicated. “
This is what happened this summer of viruses, since the new epidemics have a reason to develop anxiety and even alarm.
“Any past narrative that we’ve conquered infectious diseases through remedies and preventive measures hasn’t really come true,” said Jeremy Greene, who teaches history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “The attention paid to covid-19 as an ancient once-in-a-lifetime pandemic is already in itself an illusion. . .
In many ways, viral invasion is not an accident. Global warming, forest loss and globalization have accelerated the spread of pathogens from animals to humans, as well as among other people in other parts of the world.
The human population has doubled in the last 50 years to nearly 8 billion, fueling the expansion of megacities and the demand for land to build houses and raise crops and animals. The global transformation of land has resulted in the annual loss of nearly 25 million acres of forest, eroding a classic boundary between the human and animal worlds, according to the United Nations.
Closer contact with animals puts us in touch with the pathogens they carry, which cause 60% of all human diseases.
“We live in a world of microbial evolution and microbes enjoy each and every imaginable benefit,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
On a deeper level, some experts suggest, we have demonstrated a basic false impression of the positions humans and microbes occupy on the planet. Viruses were there long before us, and they are so much more than us. Put all viruses end to end, and “they would span a hundred million light-years,” according to an editorial in Nature Reviews Microbiology.
German virologist Karin Moelling put it this way: “We are the invaders of the viral world, the other way around. “
The summer of 2022 may be the time when humans begin to understand. Infectious diseases have great news.
“Before, if an epidemic was reported, of the hundred that were happening in Africa at any given time, it was something. But now many more are reported,” said Jimmy Whitworth, a physician specializing in infectious diseases, epidemiology and public fitness at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The Western government and media paid little attention to the monkeypox outbreak in Nigeria in 2017, they have become more competitive in finding harmful microbes in soil and sewage.
“One of the things that accompanies the increased attention we’re paying to contagion is that we’re now in wastewater for all sorts of things besides polio,” said Stephen Kissler, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T. H. University. Chan School of Public Health. ” We may stumble upon it in places where it might have gone unnoticed before. “
Kissler said he believes the high point of viral activity this summer “is partly just bad luck, in the same way that a bad typhoon is partly bad luck. But it is bad luck painted on this trend where we can begin to be waiting for those occasions more and more frequently.
The trend most cited by scientists is the strong influence of human culture on the planet. A first turning point came in 2009 when, for the first time, more people lived in cities than in rural areas, according to the United Nations.
The increase in the number of urban dwellers has led to the overloading and contamination of water and sanitation systems, especially in the poorest countries. Such situations have laid the groundwork for the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera, which has caused more than 820,000 infections and nearly 10,000 deaths in Haiti after an earthquake in 2010. While cholera is caused by bacteria, water also transmits viruses, adding hepatitis A and E viruses, rotaviruses, noroviruses, and polioviruses.
Climate replacement also increases the threat of infectious diseases. Writing last month in the journal Nature, the researchers reported that 58 percent of the 375 infectious diseases they tested “were bothered at some point by the vagaries of the weather. “Only 16 percent of diseases have declined due to climate substitution.
As the climate brings humans closer to animals, temperatures are attracting insects and other disease carriers to parts of the world that were once too bloody to survive.
The “steady march north” of the Asian tiger mosquito, which carries diseases such as chikungunya, Zika and dengue to new continents, is a classic example, Whitworth said. But over the past 50 years, it has spread to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North and South America. The mosquito first appeared in the United States in the mid-1980s at tire dumps in Harris County, Texas; since then it has progressed to the maximum of that country.
Much of the tiger mosquito migration has been facilitated through foreign industry in the one billion used tires generated year. Old tires accumulate stagnant water, forming an ideal breeding floor for mosquitoes.
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor School of Medicine, said summer viral activity is the result of trends that have evolved over the past decade.
“I think it’s a confluence of climate change, global warming, the conversion of rainfall patterns, but not just climate change,” he said. — because poverty is such a dominant driving force — competitive urbanization, deforestation and anti-vaccine activists and what I call aggression against science. “
Gonzalo Moratorio, who directs the Laboratory of Experimental Virus Evolution at the Pasteur Institute in Montevideo, Uruguay, calls those factors, along with human displacement and animal dependence on meat, “an explosive cocktail that leads to the pandemic opportunities we have witnessed. “”
Although Uruguay’s 83% COVID-19 vaccination rate exceeds that of the United States (68%) and the United Kingdom (75%), there is still vocal and even violent opposition to shootings. Moratorio said his house painted anti-vaccine graffiti and a year ago he attacked in the street through a vaccine opponent brandishing a stick.
Part of the problem, he said, is that “vaccines have done a wonderful job and the good fortune of that is that there are other people who don’t know about those infections because they were about to be eradicated. “
Eradicating an infectious disease is not an easy task. The World Health Organization introduced its effort to eliminate smallpox in 1959 and, despite everything, declared victory on May 8, 1980, the only success in eliminating a human infectious disease. The effort to end polio took more than 30 years and cost $17 billion.
Given this summer’s polio diagnosis through an unvaccinated Rockland County man who had recently traveled to Poland and Hungary, and the detection of the virus in the sewer systems of two major cities, the effort to eliminate polio will be “much, much more challenging. “Kissler said. . . “With infectious diseases, there’s a big difference between having nothing and having something. “
World fitness leaders will have the luxury of focusing on polio as long as COVID-19 continues and other viral threats emerge.
Measures taken to combat COVID-19 (lockdowns, social distancing, and wearing masks) have likely contributed to deaths well below average from more common viruses like the flu. However, as other people get rid of those protections, viruses are returning to communities that now have degrees of diminished immunity.
“I think it’s a very clever explanation for what we’ve noticed with hepatitis,” said Dean Blumberg, infectious disease leader at the University of California at Davis Health, referring to this year’s global outbreak. “There has been very little transmissionArray. . the stops, and when things open up, there’s a kind of suppressed susceptibility. “
Another virus he said he was involved in is parechovirus, which has been circulating in the United States since at least the spring. The virus can cause fever, encephalitis-like syndrome, and severe sepsis in newborns and young babies.
What worries Blumberg most, however, is measles, which he describes as “one of the most infectious pathogens known to mankind. “Measles can be serious and even deadly for young children.
“Even a small drop in population immunity can lead to widespread transmission,” he said. “So we have noticed this drop and we have increased due to the relaxation of restrictions. And much of that will go to parts of the world where measles transmission rates are higher. I think it’s only a matter of time before no more measles is imported into the United States. “
In Uruguay, Moratorio said he suspected the next risk could come from mayaro, a mosquito-borne dengue-like disease found in some of South America’s rainforests and that “may have the potential to become the new Zika. “other people have learned from the pandemic and the additional viral activity this summer, “but I’m not sure decision makers have learned. Suddenly, the market and inflation are things. “
The researchers said the fight against infectious diseases will have to become a global precedent, a precedent in which nations also treat an outbreak in some other country as their problem. They point out that rich countries will have to share vaccine doses with poorer countries to curb the spread of viruses before they reach the other side of the world.
Hotez said that given the possibility of pandemics “collapsing economies,” U. S. leaders have been able to. . . The U. S. will have to take the risk of epidemics as seriously as those of terrorism, nuclear weapons, and cyberattacks. and elsewhere, that this is just the beginning,” he said. “We’re going to have covid-25 and covid-31 all the way. “
At Montefiore Nyack Hospital, Azfar Chak said he, his wife and their 4 children had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. He remains hopeful that “we will regain the sense of normalcy we had before covid,” he adds, “some viral epidemics are inevitable. “
Experience taught him to expect surprises. A few years ago, he and his colleagues faced a measles outbreak that sickened another 312 people in Rockland County, most of them unvaccinated children, long after the World Health Organization declared that endemic transmission of the virus was eliminated from the United States.
In its 2000 statement, the WHO had included a warning: “Travelers continue to bring measles into the United States, and it can spread and cause outbreaks in unvaccinated people. “
Related content
Gene editing can revive a nearly lost tree. Not everyone agrees.
A melting glacier, a people in danger and a farmer’s fight for climate justice
The hatred that those black women can’t as a technique 100