Plagues and pandemics of virus are of course calamities that denote symptoms rather than a natural course of life forms coexisting. Were not the killer viruses around from time immemorial? Did they pose the kind of threat in the dawn of time as they pose at present? If looked closely into the constant outbreaks of plagues, so would I assume, owe to our own kind for the root cause: we have interfered and impoverished the environment, in order to maintain our civilization. The appetite of the North or South is made all the more acute. Wisdom has become so altered in human kind that it is not reason but greed that dictates power.
Civilization requires large resources to maintain: large population essential to keep the fruits of civilization to themselves so many would also invite still more influx of labor. Clearing of woodlands, forests and changing the course of running streams are all for catering to the ever growing needs of civilizations on the march. In its wake comes the alterations to the environment: delicate balance of habitats are upset; levels of microclimate swing to extremes. Flora and fauna native to its natural habitats must take their chances. Under such uncontrolled changes the viruses also will find their way out.
(For further reading:
NEWS RELEASE FROM THE
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE AND HYGIENE
Date: December 30, 2005
Link Between Malaria Epidemics and Rainforest Destruction in the Peruvian Amazon
Amy Vittor, a Johns Hopkins graduate student and currently a medical student at Stanford University, under the supervision of Jonathan Patz, now at the University of Wisconsin, and other collaborators, carried out a field study in the Amazon region in northeastern Peru to examine the question whether the epidemic reappearance of malaria in the Peruvian Amazon in the 1990s was related to destruction of rainforest.
Over one year, the investigators collected mosquitoes at sites with varying amounts of deforestation and other anthropogenically-driven changes along a newly constructed road. The authors found that the abundance of a particularly dangerous mosquito, Anopheles darlingi, was over 200-fold higher in deforested locations compared to more pristine rainforest sites: a relationship that held up even after considering human population density. This mosquito species is the major vector of malaria in the Amazon basin and is particularly dangerous since, similar to its cousin in sub-Saharan Africa An. gambiae, An. darlingi is highly attracted to people. These results indicate that this major mosquito vector of malaria in the Amazon is significantly affected by habitat and land cover change due to deforestation.
Anopheles darlingi had not existed in western Amazonia as of the late 1980s, and had only moved westward across the Amazon basic from Brazil since that time. Rapid development, accompanied by deforestation brought humans into increased contact with a variety of emerging infectious diseases in the region including yellow fever, leishmaniasis, and leptospirosis, with the constant potential for new, previously unidentified diseases emerging such as mosquito and rodent borne hemorrhagic fevers. Man’s alteration of local landscape may now explain the parallel rapid rise of malaria cases in the Amazon region.
According to the senior author of this paper, Patz, accompanying analyses on mosquito-larval habitat and human epidemiology are forthcoming; he says that preliminary results confirm this link between deforestation and malaria risk in the Amazon.)
benny
Labels: cause and effect, conservation, nature, payback time
