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pandemics
Staring Down the Abyss of 2025
The basis of hope for a better future, I believe, is the courage to accept reality. A change of collective consciousness is our best shot at not only surviving but thriving.
Jan 05, 2025
2025 offers an intriguing mix of the certain and the uncertain.
Here’s what is certain: Democratic institutions will continue to crumble, witness the erosion of the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere; long-standing norms governing public affairs, such as a bar to prosecuting political opponents, will loosen their grip on behavior; countless species, especially among birds and insects, will go extinct; a host of “unnatural” disasters attributable to climate change, like wild fires and floods, will devastate wondrous landscapes and settled communities; politically or environmentally-induced mass migration, as experienced now in the various parts of the world, will become more pervasive; income inequality between the top 0.01% and the lowest 50% will increase; economic stability, as in the world-wide acceptance of the U.S. Dollar, will wane.
While not a certainty there’s reason to give added credibility to the risks of nuclear warfare, catastrophic climate tipping points, metastatic ethnic cleansing, and a world-wide pandemic, with mass extinction the result.
Within our own narrower, national context, certainties include the highest ever figures for extraction of natural gas and oil, continued increases in chronic diseases such as Type-2 diabetes and cancer, ballooning healthcare costs per capita, upward swings in gun sales and school shootings, dramatically increased levels of homelessness, and more intrusion of microplastics into the oceans and into our bodies.
An unfettered grasp of our situation can offer up considerable light, hope, even optimism; and it can strengthen our resolve and solidify our resilience.
Uncertain are the targets, timing, locales, extent of severity, and designation of victims related to these eminently predicable developments in the world and in our country. Unclear is what will constitute right and effective action in the face of this inevitable political, social, and environmental unravelling. Finally, the grounding for individual and collective action—spiritual moorings, moral anchors, forms of mutual aid—remains inchoate.
To be human is to know we are going to die. This is certain. With each passing day of 2025, my physical being will be undergoing its own forms of unravelling, making death more proximate. What I don’t know is when and under what circumstances it will occur. Nor do I know for sure what my attitude and affect will be should I be conscious at the time.
With increasing disintegration worldwide and the social fabric in this country fraying, what can one do, how should one approach and contend with encroaching forms of “death” in the world and in this country? What are citizens’ essential responsibilities? For me what are mine as a mate, a father, grandfather, and friend?
You, the reader, might conclude, as you absorb all this, “How pessimistic, how fatalistic!” It will likely surprise you that that is not my mind set at all. Rather I am of the mind that the truth indeed sets one free. An unfettered grasp of our situation can offer up considerable light, hope, even optimism; and it can strengthen our resolve and solidify our resilience. Take a hard look at the obverse: that burying unvarnished realities has improved our prospects. Hardly! Denial, obfuscation, euphemism, soft- pedaling, and distraction have not improved things. In fact, a strong case can be made that they have produced exactly the opposite, a deepening of our plight.
So I beckon my fellow citizens to adopt a different strategy, one that willfully accepts our dire circumstances, without wallowing in them, thus offering the chance of achieving more positive outcomes than our current predicament presages. The basis of hope for a better future, I believe, is the courage to accept reality. A change of collective consciousness is our best shot at not only surviving but thriving.
That I will die soon is certain. That 2025 heralds negative trend lines on multiple fronts is certain. But this is where the parallel can end. With a willingness on all our parts to accept our dire lot we can begin to veer away from what now seems a foregone conclusion.
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Biodiversity and Climate Crises 'Increase the Risks of Future Pandemics': Study
"New study in Nature confirms that if we want to avoid the next pandemic—we should stop destroying biodiversity, heating, and polluting the planet," one expert said.
May 09, 2024
Biodiversity loss, the introduction of invasive species, the climate emergency, and chemical pollution all increase the risk of infectious disease, a first-of-its-kind analysis has found.
The paper, published in Nature Wednesday, reviewed 972 studies and 2,938 observations on how human-driven environmental change had impacted the spread of disease, looking specifically at 1,497 host-parasite relationships.
"New study in Nature confirms that if we want to avoid the next pandemic—we should stop destroying biodiversity, heating, and polluting the planet," Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, who leads the World Health Organization's climate change unit and was not involved with the study, wrote on social media. "Just one more reason to go for a greener, healthier future."
"This adds to a very long list of reasons we should be rapidly moving away from fossil fuels and trying to mitigate the impacts of climate change."
The Covid-19 pandemic, which some scientists believe passed from bats to humans, has led to increased interest in how diseases emerge and spread. At the same time, research research has pointed to a larger range for pathogens and their hosts as one of the health dangers of the climate emergency. For example, The Lancet's most recent report on climate change and health predicted that, if temperatures rise by 2°C above preindustrial levels by 2100, the ideal conditions for Vibrio would expand by 17-25% and the risk of catching dengue fever would go up by 36-37%.
While previous studies had considered how certain types of environmental change—like deforestation or global heating—impacted disease spread, no study had considered the risk for plants, animals, and humans across the different ways that industrial society has altered the environment.
"This literature gap is critical to fill because resources for infectious disease management will always be limited and could be poorly targeted without knowledge of which global change drivers most affect infectious diseaserisk," the study authors write.
The researchers looked at four major drivers of change: biodiversity loss, the introduction of new species, the climate crisis, and habitat loss or alteration. They found that human-driven biodiversity loss increased illness and death by almost nine times compared with areas where biodiversity remained intact. The next most impactful changes were the introduction of new species, global heating and increased carbon dioxide levels, and chemical pollution such as pesticides and fertilizers, which can put additional pressure on plants' and animals' immune systems.
"It could mean that by modifying the environment, we increase the risks of future pandemics," study co-author Jason Rohr, a University of Notre Dame biology professor, toldThe Washington Post of the results.
One way that the loss of species can increase disease is by eliminating rare species, Rohr explained toThe New York Times. As parasites and pathogens tend to evolve to infect more common species, when these species are all that remain, the risk of infection goes up. One example is the rise of white-footed mice, who host Lyme disease. One theory is that as these mice have proliferated in comparison with other, rarer mammals, the rates of Lyme disease in the U.S. have gone up. Of course, the spread of Lyme disease has also been linked to the expansion of the range of ticks due to warming temperatures, in an example of how different environmental alterations can interact to increase illness.
"This adds to a very long list of reasons we should be rapidly moving away from fossil fuels and trying to mitigate the impacts of climate change," Bard College professor Felicia Keesing, who was not a part of the study, told the Post in response to its findings.
One of the study's more surprising discoveries was that habitat loss actually decreased disease. The authors think this is due to the rise and expansion of cities, as urban areas tend to have better public health and fewer opportunities for humans and animals to mix and exchange germs.
"In urban areas with lots of concrete, there is a much smaller number of species that can thrive in that environment," Rohr toldThe Guardian. "From a human disease perspective, there is often greater sanitation and health infrastructure than in rural environments."
Colin Carlson, a Georgetown University biologist who was not part of the research team, told the Times that the lack of urban biodiversity was "not a good thing."
Next, the researchers hope to explore more about the connections between the different drivers of change.
"Importantly, greater effort is needed to identify win-win solutions that address multiple societal stressors, such as disease, food, energy, water, sustainability, and poverty challenges," they write.
However, the study already points the way toward some recommendations: "Specifically, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing ecosystem health, and preventing biological invasions and biodiversityloss could help to reduce the burden of plant, animal, and humandiseases,especially when coupled with improvements to social and economic determinants of health," the researchers advise.
Carlson told the Times that the study was "a big step forward in the science."
"This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss," Carlson said.
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Sanders Seeks Public Input for Long Covid Moonshot Legislation
"The time is long overdue for Congress to treat long Covid as the public health emergency that it is," said the Senate HELP Committee chair.
Apr 09, 2024
"As chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, it is my strong belief that the crisis of long Covid is a public health emergency that we can no longer ignore."
That's how U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) began a Tuesday letter inviting public comment on a $10 billion bill he is crafting to address the crisis of at least 22 million Americans enduring chronic or relapsing symptoms after a Covid-19 infection.
"In January 2024, the HELP Committee held a hearing on the topic of long Covid where experts underscored the urgent need to aggressively find approved treatments for this terrible disease, to better educate medical professionals on how to diagnose long Covid, to better understand the risks associated with long Covid, and to identify potential therapeutic options, among many other things," notes the letter.
We cannot ignore the public health crisis that is Long COVID. On Long COVID Awareness Day, let us commit to doing everything we can to address this horrible condition. The U.S. government must do more to increase awareness and provide additional resources to develop treatments. pic.twitter.com/OLnRkhivm7
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 15, 2024
"Before getting Covid-19 in Los Angeles in March 2020, I was a runner for nearly two decades," Angela Meriquez Vazquez, a long Covid patient and former president of Body Politic, told the panel. "What started as a mild illness progressed over weeks with an increasingly scary set of symptoms, including severe levels of blood clots, a series of mini-strokes, brain swelling, seizures, painful heart palpitations, severe shortness of breath, extreme confusion, and numbness in my face, hands, and legs that progressed to an inability to walk for several days, and new onset of allergic anaphylaxis after every meal."
"We are living through what is likely to be the largest mass disabling event in modern history," she warned. "Not since the emergence of the AIDS pandemic has there been such an imperative for large-scale change in healthcare, public health, and inequitable structures that bring exceptional risks of illness, suffering, disability, and mortality."
Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in Saint Louis and one of the experts who testified earlier this year, pointed out that there are no medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating the condition and "the ongoing and planned trials for long Covid are too slow and too small (i.e. underpowered) to provide definitive answers."
"We developed vaccines at warp speed. We are doing trials for long Covid at snail speed," the doctor said. "We don't go through an earthquake without dealing with its aftermath. We cannot live through the biggest pandemic of our lives without dealing with the aftermath."
Sanders' proposed legislation would provide a decade of mandatory funding to help the National Institutes of Health respond to the crisis. At the NIH, the bill would create a centralized coordinating entity for research activities, establish an advisory board, and require the federal agency to launch a new grant process for clinical trials as well as a database "for the storage and dissemination of de-identified patient data to make long Covid research more accessible."
The bill would also "require federal entities to provide continued education and support to patients, providers, and the public about the ongoing risks of long Covid, as well as how to identify and address it," explains the letter, which has an addendum detailing the plan.
The committee is accepting emailed feedback on the proposal at LongCovidComments@help.senate.gov through April 23.
"In my view, the time is long overdue for Congress to treat long Covid as the public health emergency that it is," Sanders said in a statement. "Congress must act now to ensure a treatment is found for this terrible disease that affects millions of Americans and their families."
Sanders, a longtime advocate of ensuring everyone in the nation has healthcare by passing Medicare for All legislation, stressed that "far too many patients with long Covid have struggled to get their symptoms taken seriously. Far too many medical professionals have either dismissed or misdiagnosed their health problems."
"That has got to change," he asserted. "We cannot turn our backs on the millions of Americans who continue to suffer from long Covid. I look forward to hearing from patients, experts, and researchers about what we must do to address this crisis."
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