10/17/2014
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Did Deforestation Pave the Way for Ebola Outbreak?
Deforestation is a huge global problem, because it destroys animal habitats, deprives indigenous peoples of their traditional livelihoods and contributes to climate change. But if that doesn’t tip the scale for you, here’s yet another downside to be concerned about. Deforestation might have a role in this year’s outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, which already has killed 4,500 people there. The often-fatal disease now is raising anxiety in the United States, after two Dallas nurses caught Ebola while treating a Liberian refugee who eventually died.
A 2005 article in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Consortium for Conservation Medicine points out that about 75 percent of infectious diseases — including Ebola — are caused by pathogens that started out in animals but then mutated and jumped to humans. Deforestation increases contact between humans and wildlife, who often expose themselves to diseases when they kill and eat the animals for food. When loggers build roads deep into forests to enable them to haul out timber, they also provide greater mobility for people with infections, who then can spread them far and wide.
A 2012 article in the Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research notes that since the mid-1990s, Ebola outbreaks in Africa have closely tracked drastic changes in forest ecosystems. “Extensive deforestation and human activities in the depth of the forests may have promoted direct or indirect contact between humans and a natural reservoir of the virus,” the researchers concluded.
This year’s outbreak in west Africa follows that template. A July Washington Post article reported that the three countries hit hardest by the epidemic also have experienced massive deforestation. In Guinea, the rainforest has shrunk to less than a fifth of its original size, and in Liberia, more than half of forests have been sold off to loggers. Sierra Leone has lost a quarter of its wooded land, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Roads created by loggers allowed Ebola to spread from the forest to urban areas. Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian and epidemiologist with EcoHealth Alliance, told Public Radio International: ”This is certainly what happened as cases moved from the Guéckédou region of Guinea, into Conakry, the capital. That hadn’t happened before.
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