revealed Thursday how the climate emergency is expected to push wild animals into regions more heavily populated with humans, conditions that could spread viruses across species and even lead to future pandemics.
"It's unclear exactly how these new viruses might affect the species involved," he added,"but it's likely that many of them will translate to new conservation risks and fuel the emergence of novel outbreaks in humans.", a team led by Georgetown scientists identified potential future hotspots for spillover—the spread of pathogens from animals to people—by modeling projected geographic shifts for 3,139 mammal species through 2070.
"We worry about markets because bringing unhealthy animals together in unnatural combinations creates opportunities for this stepwise process of emergence—like how SARS jumped from bats to civets, then civets to people," he said."But markets aren't special anymore; in a changing climate, that kind of process will be the reality in nature just about everywhere."
Sam Scheiner, a program director with the U.S. National Science Foundation—which funded the new research—said that"the Covid-19 pandemic, and the previous spread of SARS, Ebola, and Zika, show how a virus jumping from animals to humans can have massive effects. To predict their jump to humans, we need to know about their spread among other animals."The researchers were not able to say exactly which viruses would move between which species.
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