Deforestation as a reason for spreading of diseases
The risk of disease outbreaks can be greatly magnified after forests are cleared for agriculture and roads. Throughout human history, pathogens have emerged from forests. The Zika virus, for example, which is believed to be causing microencephaly, or smaller than normal heads, in newborns in Latin America, emerged from the Zika forest of Uganda in the 1940s. Dengue, Chikungunya, yellow fever, and some other mosquito-borne pathogens likely also came out of the forests of Africa. Forests contain numerous pathogens that have been passed back and forth between mosquitoes and mammals for ages. Because they evolved together, these viruses often cause few or no symptoms in their hosts, providing “a protective effect from a homegrown infection,” says Richard Pollack of the T.H. Chan School Public Health at Harvard. But humans often have no such protection. How deforestation helps deadly viruses jump from animals to humans The coronavirus pandemic, sus...