France 24: Nature loss means deadlier future pandemics, U.N. warns
“Future pandemics will happen more often, kill more people, and wreak even worse damage to the global economy than Covid-19 without a fundamental shift in how humans treat nature, the United Nations’ biodiversity panel said Thursday. Warning that there are up to 850,000 viruses which, like the novel coronavirus, exist in animals and may be able to infect people, the panel known as IPBES said pandemics represented an ‘existential threat’ to humanity. Authors of the special report on biodiversity and pandemics said that habitat destruction and insatiable consumption made animal-borne diseases far more likely to make the jump to people in future…” (10/29).

U.N. News: Reduce risk to avert ‘era of pandemics,’ experts warn in new report
“…Their study stems from an urgent virtual workshop convened by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to investigate the links between pandemic risk and the degradation of nature. It finds that risk is increasing rapidly, with more than five new diseases emerging in people every year, any one of which could potentially spark a pandemic. COVID-19 is at least the sixth global health pandemic since the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, also known as the Spanish flu, the 22 experts said…” (10/29).