How can nations prevent more pandemics like COVID-19? One priority is reducing the risk of diseases’ jumping from animals to humans. And that means understanding how human actions fuel that.
Human disturbance affects the disease dynamics of a place through its effect on the prevalence of host and parasite species in the geography, a study finds. The study published in Ecology Letters attributes this to persistence of parasite communities which tend to inhabit multiple host species, thereby increasing the risk of emergence of infectious diseases. […]
The virus arrived by air, inside bats that fed on fruit trees beside pig farms. It entered the pigs and passed via their coughs to the humans who tended them.