Amazon rainforest can gift world its next deadly pandemic, warn scientists

According to scientists, the next deadly pandemic of the world can start in the depths of the Amazon rainforest from caves like the Planaltina cave, which is more than 1.5 kilometres deep and houses thousands of bats.

More such caves exist throughout the rainforest increasing the chances of an outbreak of a pandemic like coronavirus. A countless number of bat species and their habitats remain undiscovered and unexplored.

Brazil has been ranked in third place in hosting the highest number of bat species across the world. Some of the most devastating viruses in the world have emerged from bats.

Scientists are studying the emergence of such viruses to prevent any future pandemics like COVID-19. However, because of limited funding, scientists fear that they will fail to unravel these pathogenic mysteries in the near time.

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Researchers claim that humans have been lucky in avoiding any major virus getting spread from the rainforest.

“If you don't do this now, there may be other outbreaks in the future and end up in the situation we are in today of not knowing where this outbreak comes from, where SARS-CoV-2 comes from. And that's a big problem, because if we don't know how to identify the path that this virus took, the evolutionary question and how it got to man, we can't fight it," said Sebastien Charneau, a professor at the Biology Institute at the University of Brasilia, while speaking to Reuters.

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Rampant deforestation cause of another pandemic?

As per the Brazilian ecologist David Lapola, the next pandemic can emerge from the Amazon rainforest because of “rampant deforestation” which has resulted because of human encroachment on animal habitats.

According to World Health Organisation's expert in zoonotic diseases, Peter Ben Embarek, the novel coronavirus emerges from a group of viruses which originate or spread in bats, although it remains unclear which animal transmitted the infection to humans.

Lapola, speaking to the news agency AFP, said that the same processes are taking place in the Amazon.

“The Amazon is a huge reservoir of viruses,” Lapola said, who studies how human activity will shape the future of tropical forests' ecosystems. “We’d better not try our luck,” he added.

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The risk of another pandemic keeps on increasing with the Amazon rainforest's rapid deforestation. Scientists explain that deforestation leads to stress in bats and studies suggest that stressed bats can carry more viruses and release more germs through their saliva, urine and feces.

“It is very sad to know that we have great potential to discover and prevent new epidemics, new pandemics and this is not being taken into account, nobody is thinking about it. On the contrary, we are currently having a very large investment in dismantling the environment," said Ludmilla Aguiar, who works as a biologist at the University of Brasilia.

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