Diseases will kill 12 times more people by 2050
A new study has issued a shocking warning that diseases transmitted from animals to humans could kill 12 times more by 2050 people compared to the pandemic year 2020.
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Researchers said “urgent action” was needed to combat the threat and warned that their grim forecast figures , are likely to be underestimates because the study did not include COVID, Sky News reports.
Animal-to-human diseases could kill at least 12 times more people in 2050 than in 2020, according to a new study.
Epidemics caused by certain zoonotic infectious diseases, also known as spillovers effects may occur more frequently in the future due to climate change and deforestation, US biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks said.
The researchers found that between 1963 and 2019, the number of epidemics increased annually by almost 5%, and deaths increased by 9%, Sky News notes.
“If these annual growth rates continue, we expect that The pathogens analyzed would cause four times more adverse effects and 12 times more deaths in 2050 than in 2020,» the study found.
However, the researchers cautioned that these numbers are likely to be an underestimate , since COVID was not included in the study because the disease did not meet their strict inclusion criteria.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said it was «likely» that the coronavirus was transmitted to humans from bats, but some scientists have disputed this theory, recalls Sky News.
The study, published in BMJ Global Health, analyzed historical trends for four specific disease types. It was a group of diseases associated with filoviruses, which included Ebola and Marburg viruses, SARS coronavirus 1, Nipa virus and Machupo virus.
The researchers studied more than 3,000 outbreaks between 1963 and 2019 and identified 75 adverse events in 24 countries.
This included epidemics reported by WHO, outbreaks since 1963 that killed 50 or more people, and historically significant events, including the influenza pandemics of 1918 and 1957.
In total, these events resulted in a total of 17,232 deaths, of which 15,771 were caused by filoviruses and occurred primarily in Africa.
The researchers added that evidence of recent epidemics caused by zoonotic spillovers suggests that they «are not an aberration or a random cluster» but follow a «multi-year trend in which epidemics caused by spillovers are becoming both larger and more frequent.»
As reported by Sky News, the team added that «urgent action is needed to address the large and growing risk to global health» based on historical trends.