Pandemics of Our Own Making

Pandemics of Our Own Making

Why We Must Address Our Broken Relationship with Nature

by Shannon Bennett

While it’s critical that we devote our scientific ingenuity to beating back the current pandemic, we must also address our broken relationship with nature in a concerted effort to prevent similar outbreaks in the future.

With the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking various forms of havoc around the globe, we’ve all had a lot of time to ponder not only how we got into this predicament, but how we might get out—and what we need to do to prevent future outbreaks.

Like much of the rest of the world, I’ve been social-distancing for months, doing my best to minimize exposure and keep my family, friends, and community safe. But as a virologist who has spent her career studying the evolution of infectious diseases, I can’t help thinking about the bigger picture, about how our relationship with the natural world can have profound impacts—both positive and negative— not just on the health of our planet but on human health as well.

While I’m more passionate than ever about the work I do, I didn’t always want to be an infectious disease biologist. My first love was the great outdoors. I imagined a life spent traipsing around a national park and inspiring that love in others.

Then the theatre captured my heart and all I wanted to do was act. Finally, in college, I had the opportunity to combine my passions for the natural world and the arts, running a theatre program to promote community health in West Africa. That’s where my fascination with microbes began.

With antimalarial medication, insect repellent, and a well-stocked firstaid kit in hand, I arrived in Liberia for a summer volunteer stint teaching math by day and theatricizing with my troupe of students by night.

Ironically, even while we told stories of disease prevention, and despite my best efforts to protect myself, within weeks I had contracted malaria (Plasmodium falciparum), amoebic dysentery (En tomaeba histolytica), and a staph infection (Staphylococcus aureus).

This trifecta of illness ultimately landed me under the care of nurses at, of all places, a leper colony (caused by Mycobacterium leprae, but I dodged this one). There I slowly regained my strength and then remained in hiding at the most shunned of places just as the first attempted coup of the Liberian civil war began.

Ironically, the parasites in my system had quite literally saved my life. But it was the diverse kinds of microbes and the ways in which they had breached my defenses and affected me physically that captured my imagination.

From Pathogen to Career Path

Although the three pathogens that infected my body all those years ago come from different branches on the tree of life, I would discover that they have some interesting things in common: They themselves and/or their recent ancestors all circulate in nonhuman natural hosts; they have the capacity to evolve quickly in response to new opportunities; and, in many cases, they have done so in ways that allow them to overcome our defenses and thereby expand their geographical ranges and find new potential hosts.

The remarkable capacity of pathogens to adapt and affect us so profoundly is what ultimately inspired my newfound, and now lifelong, career path. I wanted to understand the diversity of pathogens in natural systems, the various ways in which they’ve evolved, and how, in response to the opportunities humans have presented them, they have emerged as infectious diseases—in some cases capable of the type of pandemic we find ourselves in today...read more at https://issuu.com/rareluxuryliving/docs/raremagazinesustainablepages/298