More troops died of disease than were killed in battle during the conflicts of the 18th and 19th centuries and a global pandemic emerged during WW1, so could a warzone spark the next one
Mad Vlad’s war in Ukraine could spark the next global pandemic, experts fear. Infectious disease physician Amesh Adalja warns that battle zones are a breeding ground for diseases spread among soldiers on the front line.
And he fears another pandemic could be happening right now and we “don’t even know about it”. He said: “The first jumps of a new virus into humans could be happening right now as we’re speaking. We never know.
“Think about how many diseases don’t get diagnosed. The one-offs that happen. Some rare disease happens and the person dies or they get better and no one figured out what was wrong with them. Those could be the first jumps of a pandemic pathogen.
“We’re very poor at diagnosing infectious diseases. So we won’t even know the first cases of some new pathogen will likely go unnoticed, just like SARS KV2, the cause of Covid went unnoticed, until it bubbles over.”
Dr Adalja said Russia’s war in Ukraine could be a breeding ground for diseases that can spread very quickly, including the deadly hantavirus, which is spread by mice and can cause bleeding from the eyes and kidney failure.
He told the Telegraph’s Global Health podcast: “We’ve already seen lapses in control of HIV, lapses in control of tuberculosis, and we’ve also heard of Russian soldiers getting hantavirus, which is a a virus that is spread through exposure to to rodents.
“When you think about healthcare infrastructure, it it is part of the technology that keeps infectious diseases at bay. And when you disrupt it, it’s going to have a predictable consequence. So for example, a tuberculosis clinic in Ukraine gets bombed by the Russians.
“Now those people don’t have the ability to get their tuberculosis medications or get diagnostic testing. Then tuberculosis cases worsen. Then tuberculosis cases become more contagious. Then they spread. Then those new people can’t be diagnosed and the cycle repeats.”
He also highlight the numerous Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in South Sudan, which has seen around 2.5 million flee the country and a further 2.2 million displaced internally.
Dr Adalja added: “Humanitarian crisis and infectious disease always go together. Anytime you see disruptions in people’s lives, disruptions in infrastructure and sanitation, crowding, lack of nutrition, you’re going to see infectious diseases take hold.”
Boffins have labelled the mystery pathogen that could cause the next pandemic as Disease X and British scientists this year outlined four emerging viruses that could spark another global pandemic like the Covid outbreak.
Dr Adalja said: “I think of them [pathogen] as barbarians at the gate. And it’s our technology and science that have kept them at bay. And during a conflict, during a war, a lot of that technology breaks down.”
He highlighted the “Spanish flu” which killed an estimated 100million people during World War One, which is thought to have originated in a US army camp in Kansas before spreading globally, as a possible worst case scenario for the next pandemic.
And he fears countries would not be prepared to cope with anything near that level and we’re “worse prepared than we were before Covid” to handle a global pandemic. He added: “Covid is not a major pandemic on the scale that that we would even consider 1918.
“So if you think about the case fatality ratio of Covid, how many people died that got infected? It’s probably around 0.6, but 1918 was 1 to 2% and killed 100 to 200 million or 100 million people in a time when the globe was much smaller.
“So you you have to think that what you saw in Covid with the morgue trucks in New York City, with hospitals busting at the seams, would be much much worse even if you had something that was twice as lethal as as Covid.
“And we couldn’t even handle Covid globally, so you have to think that things could get really really grim if you had something that had much higher mortality rates, especially if for example if it was like 1918 where the average age of death was was 27.”
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