President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is one of those "mini-Trump" nationalists who deny the seriousness of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic. He has likened the COVID-19 illness caused by the virus as, “no worse than a mild flu.” Global statistics collected since the outbreak of the disease put a lie to that mis- characterization. His own health minister has advised Brazilians to self-quarantine. The picture shows Bolsonaro engaged in anti-social behavior when he visited a Brasilia neighborhood on April 10th. Brazil has recorded about 2,000 deaths and 35,000 cases of COVID-19.Brazil may be at the nexus of the next pandemic to strike the globe. Recent wild fires have devastated large swaths of Amazonia. Researchers have studied the connection between changes in land use such as deforestation and novel disease outbreaks. A recent study says that diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika Virus have been linked to landscape changes. SARS CoV-2 may be the latest virus to be transmitted from animals to humans, called zoonoses.
A group of international experts on zoonotic diseases met in Columbia to discuss the effect of the Amazon devastation by fire. They warned, “The Amazon region of Brazil, endemic for many communicable or zoonotic diseases can, after a wildfire, trigger a selection for survival, and with it change the habitat and behaviors of some animal species. These can be reservoirs of zoonotic bacteria, viruses, and parasites.” Huge fires in Indonesia in 1988 caused the emergence of the Nipah virus, which had a morbidity rate between 40 and 70%. Bats fled their forest homes seeking food in orchards. Domesticated pigs ate the fruit bats nibbled becoming infected. The swine transmitted the disease to local humans who began to die from brain hemorrhages. Malaria mosquitoes do well in forested areas recently cleared. In 2008 a 10% rise in Amazon deforestation rate was correlated to a 3.3% increase in malaria transmission according to Stanford University researchers.
Despite the mounting scientific evidence of a connection between disease outbreaks and loss of biodiversity{30.03.20}, President Bolosarno is calling for full economic steam ahead. A 2019 provisional measure awaiting legislative approval rewards land grabbers who illegally felled forest on public lands in Amazonia before December 2018 — rectifying their illegal occupation by purchase of the land at greatly reduced prices, thus increasing the amount of deforestation that will occur. Large squatters can increase their holdings by using straw transactions (so called laranjas) to evade federal enforcement of size restrictions. Under the measure, squatters can also seize land occupied by indigenous who do not have deeds to their land.
All of this increase disruption of the biosphere in the name of profit will lead to future pandemics as Nature fights to defend herself from the onslaught of human greed. Infection experts were not surprised by the pandemic; they were expecting one for decades. An insurance executive at the World Economic Forum warned that the last thirty years of over 12,000 disease outbreaks has been a series of near misses ignored by policy makers responsible for controlling such threats to global public health. These people should note that around 50% of modern drugs have been developed from natural products that are threatened by biodiversity loss.