Why in News?

• The recent rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus across the world has focused attention on the invisible processes that help pathogens originally found in wild animals, infect the humans.

Factors for the origin:

• The destruction of forests and trapping or farming of wild species has brought these animals closer to humans.
• The viruses they harbour find ready hosts in domestic animals, moving to humans.
• Rising Activity: such as road building and mining cutting through forests bring more people in close contact with animals.
• Global trade in wild species: for instance, in Wuhan the trade ranges from wolf pups to rats, civets and foxes, etc. and their sale in markets along with domestic animals.

Consequences:

• Unlike previous epidemics, COVID-19 has extracted a staggering toll, killing people, forcing a lockdown.
• Economic devastation and recession.
• Short-term high growth trajectories can come to an abrupt halt with a pandemic.
• Diseases of animal origin: Examples are Ebola, HIV, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, bird flu and swine flu.

What does these Pandemics Signify?

• Maintain viable ecosystems: For instance, Nipah and Hendra viruses, involving transfer from bats to pigs in the former, and bats to horses, highlights the need of maintaining an ecosystem.
• Eliminate the need for wild animals like bats to colonise human surroundings.
• Conserve the biodiversity: Biodiversity in forests harmlessly retains dangerous virusesand other pathogens away from people.

• Stop viewing undisturbed landscapes as an impediment to economic growth.
• Warning to hasty development process: hasty permissions granted for new roads, dams, mines and power projects in already enfeebled forests can unleash more scourges.
• Forest should be left undisturbed. Pristine forests with diverse species keep viruses virtually bottled up, out of man’s way.

Zoonotic Diseases:

• Zoonotic diseases are an infectious disease caused by bacteria, viruses, or parasites that spread from non-human animals (usually vertebrates) to Humans.

Modes of Transmission:

• Direct Zoonosis: the disease is directly transmitted from other animals to humans through media such as air (influenza) or through bites and saliva (rabies).
• Indirect Zoonosis: transmission can also occur via an intermediate species (referred to as a vector), which carry the disease pathogen without getting infected.