Takepart: Did Deforestation Cause Ebola?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/10/22/did-deforestation-cause-ebola?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2014-10-22




Scientists debate whether exploiting resources in the rainforest helps diseases leap from animals to humans.

October 22, 2014 By Marc Herman

Marc Herman is the author of Searching for El Dorado and The Shores of Tripoli; a regular contributor to The Atlantic; and a cofounder of Deca Stories. He lives in Barcelona.


While Ebola continues to ravage Liberia and Sierra Leone, an old debate has returned over how best to discourage future transmissions in areas like the one from which the virus emerged.

A report by the National Institutes of Health last week confirmed that the outbreak began with a single case of transmission from an animal to a human. That likely raised the hackles of activists who've been insisting that human incursion into forests might increase the incidence of disease transmission. Mining and logging means roads and camps and workers who need food, often leading to increased consumption of, and new trade in, wild animals, known as bushmeat.

That's the thinking anyway. But it’s not clear that human activity in forests where diseases like Ebola are present increases the odds of outbreaks. The two positions—Ebola creates itself in the forest, or Ebola moves with animal populations that industry decimates—are opposite sides of a long-running, arguably life-and-death debate among scientists studying the disease.

“Ebola hasn’t been associated with natural resource exploitation,” said Peter Walsh, who studies primate ecology at Cambridge University. “The original outbreak on the Ebola River wasn’t, and the ones in southern [Democratic Republic of Congo] in 1995 and 1997 were also not. It’s just not happening.”

FULL story at link.

[NYC_SKP]

1. It didn't help.

It's not nice to fool mother nature.

Coral reefs dying off, natural systems of checks and balances ruined forever.

There's a price to pay for all of this damage we seem to do at increasingly destructive rates.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. No, evolution did.

Combine that with increased travel and large cities in Africa, and this was bound to happen eventually.