Pogo got it right. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
“Think about it,” the scientist and subject of a recent revelatory interview in Nautilus Magazine told me this week. “This covid-19 virus had existed in a small niche in China. Now it’s all over the world. ... We are a species that more than any other species will allow for rapid dispersal of these viruses.” The only answer: “We can change the way we behave on the Earth.”
Carroll is, essentially, a virus hunter. He studied diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before founding a U.S. Agency for International Development program called PREDICT that probed the planet for potential pandemics-to-be, until its funding was canceled last year.
Now he heads up his very own Global Virome Project with much the same goal — finding diseases before they find us. With luck, Carroll and his cohort will compile what he calls an “atlas” of viruses to help us understand how to curb future outbreaks and create vaccines that would wipe out not only covid-19, but covid-20, -21 and others to come.
So where are we supposed to look? Viruses are already lurking among mammals everywhere, and among birds, too. The planet hosts more than 1.6 million of them. Approximately 700,000 could infect people. PREDICT discovered 2,000 over a decade. The virus that causes covid-19 is only the seventh coronavirus known to have infected humans, Carroll explained to me from Washington’s District Wharf, where he lives on a boat. Yet scientists estimate there are about 4,000 other coronaviruses out there waiting to pounce.
Of course, viruses have been around longer than we have, and so have bats, civet cats, pigs and other prime suspects in spreading diseases from outdoor markets to living rooms in all 50 states. But these so-called zoonotic spillover events, when a virus sneaks its way into us from the wild, are occurring two or three times a year more often than they did 40 years ago. And that’s not because viruses or bats or civet cats or pigs are doing anything too different; it’s because we are.
“Viruses don’t spread,” Carroll says. “People spread viruses.”
We’re multiplying. There are billions more of us every decade now, though it took hundreds of millennia just to hit the seven-figure mark. Think about disease, Carroll instructs, like the frequency with which you’d expect to bump up against someone in a crowd: the more people, the more collisions. And the collision rate between us and animals is rising, too, because we’re transforming their habitats into our own.
We’re chopping down more trees in more places, gobbling up more and more land for livestock production, disrupting wildlife to enhance our own lives. We’re sending these livestock across oceans, and we’re sending ourselves across oceans, too, on business trips to Taiwan and beach vacations to Bali. Chinese poultry production has more than quadrupled since the 1970s. A fresh and timely study from the University of California and the University of Melbourne confirms the point: The risk of spillover is highest when species are hit by human exploitation and habitat destruction.
The Black Death probably came to Europe over the Black Sea, aboard merchant ships filled with illness-shedding rats. Carroll rattles off a rogue’s gallery of other killer diseases: “malaria, tuberculosis, certainly HIV,” the last of which he describes as the “poster child” for zoonosis. The malady first moved to a hunter in Cameroon when he slaughtered a chimpanzee. The ape’s infected blood mixed with the hunter’s blood, and the disease hopped from one primate to another: Homo sapiens.
We made ourselves part of the virus’s ecosystem, and now it is making itself part of ours. And how demonically designed the disease appears, able to exploit our every weakness. The coronavirus is the Goldilocks amount of deadly: not too lethal (then the virus would kill people too fast and too furiously for the virus to replicate), not too mild (then we could simply get ill, build herd immunity, and bid the menace goodbye), but just right for a pandemic.
Our globalized system is in part to blame for this disease ballooning, and yet at the same time our lack of global spirit is to blame for our inability to deflate the blimp before it explodes — by coordinating an international response that could contain the germ’s spread instead of allowing it to move in its own ruthless way. The same sort of international action will be necessary for Carroll’s virus-fighting atlas to come to fruition, too. Can we summon the will, not to mention the goodwill?
The problem is everything is connected, and the problem is, despite all that, we’re not connected enough.
“There’s fundamentally nothing special about us in this equation,” Carroll says, because a virus doesn’t discriminate between great apes and lesser ones, or between bats and boys — except that we act as if we are very special indeed.
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