World health Organization experts investigate at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research on Feb. 3, 2021.
(Photo credit: HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images) In the final chapter of his book “A World History of Infectious Diseases,” Hiroyuki Ishiguchi, a former senior advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme and professor at the University of Tokyo Research Institute, reveals the areas where future wars with infectious diseases are likely to occur. He said that both China and Africa have serious public health concerns, especially China, where there have been several pandemics of infectious diseases that have spread around the world.
In the past three global plague pandemics, as well as the new influenza that continues to hit the world, by the recent genetic analysis technology, it is believed that it may be from mainland China.
According to Hiroshi Shih’s analysis, the population of mainland China is more than 1.34 billion, and the scale of population movement has increased tenfold in the last 10 years, which has become the basis for the spread of infectious diseases; coupled with the backwardness of the Epidemic prevention system; the atmosphere and water quality have also been polluted for a long Time, which hurts the human respiratory tract and makes it easier for pathogens to invade the human body.
In an interview with the New York Times last year, Jennifer Huang Bouey, an epidemiologist and senior policy fellow at RAND Corporation, noted that mainland China is, in a way, a laboratory, with a significant number of epidemics originating in or passing through mainland China, including
The two devastating flu pandemics of the 20th century, the 1957 Asian flu and the 1968 Hong Kong flu, both originated in mainland China and killed about 3 million people worldwide. The outbreak of avian influenza in Hong Kong in 1998, which killed at least 18 people, was found to have originated from poultry raised in southern China; SARS in 2003, which killed 774 people, traced its origin to civets sold in Food markets in southern China; and African swine fever in 2018, which killed nearly half of the pigs in mainland China, although the virus
Although the virus did not originate in mainland China, the backward epidemic prevention policies and mismanagement in mainland China accelerated the spread of the epidemic, even to other Asian countries. Many epidemiologists believe that the large population of mainland China and the close communication between urban and rural residents are the main reasons for the outbreak of zoonotic diseases.
A similar situation can be found in Africa. In his book, Hiroyuki Shih says that Africa is still ravaged by many new infectious diseases, including mosquito-borne Rift Valley fever, Lassa fever, malaria, and the Ebola virus, which originated in 1976 and has recently swept Africa again.
Because of the increase in urban populations, mostly in slums in developing countries, which double every 15 years in Africa and 26 years in West Asia, these places are like large petri dishes that have become hosts for microorganisms.
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