An Infectious disease doctor has warned that battle zones are a breeding ground for diseases spread among soldiers expressing fears another pandemic could be happening right now
Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine could trigger the next global pandemic, experts have warned.
Infectious disease expert Amesh Adalja has cautioned that battlefields create ideal conditions for illnesses to spread rapidly amongst troops on the front line. The physician fears another pandemic could already be emerging “right now”, without our knowledge.
He said: “The first jumps of a new virus into humans could be happening right now as we’re speaking. We never know. Think about how many diseases don’t get diagnosed. The one-offs that happen. Some rare disease happens and the person dies or they get better and no one figured out what was wrong with them.
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“Those could be the first jumps of a pandemic pathogen”, reports the Daily Star. “We’re very poor at diagnosing infectious diseases. So we won’t even know the first cases of some new pathogen will likely go unnoticed, just like SARS KV2, the cause of Covid went unnoticed, until it bubbles over.”
Dr Adalja warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could become a hotbed for rapidly-spreading illnesses. This includes the potential for the lethal hantavirus, transmitted by mice and capable of causing bleeding from the eyes and kidney failure.
Speaking on the Telegraph’s Global Health podcast, he said: “We’ve already seen lapses in control of HIV, lapses in control of tuberculosis, and we’ve also heard of Russian soldiers getting hantavirus, which is a a virus that is spread through exposure to to rodents. When you think about healthcare infrastructure, it it is part of the technology that keeps infectious diseases at bay.
“And when you disrupt it, it’s going to have a predictable consequence. So for example, a tuberculosis clinic in Ukraine gets bombed by the Russians.
“Now those people don’t have the ability to get their tuberculosis medications or get diagnostic testing. Then tuberculosis cases worsen. Then tuberculosis cases become more contagious. Then they spread. Then those new people can’t be diagnosed and the cycle repeats.”
He also highlighted the numerous Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in South Sudan, which has seen around 2.5 million flee the country and a further 2.2 million displaced internally. Dr Adalja added: “Humanitarian crisis and infectious disease always go together.
“Anytime you see disruptions in people’s lives, disruptions in infrastructure and sanitation, crowding, lack of nutrition, you’re going to see infectious diseases take hold.” Scientists have labelled the mystery pathogen that could trigger the next pandemic as Disease X, and British researchers this year identified four emerging viruses that could spark another global pandemic like the Covid outbreak.
Dr Adalja said: “I think of them [pathogen] as barbarians at the gate. And it’s our technology and science that have kept them at bay. And during a conflict, during a war, a lot of that technology breaks down.”
He pointed to the “Spanish flu” which claimed an estimated 100million lives during World War One, believed to have started in a US army camp in Kansas before spreading across the globe, as a potential worst case scenario for the next pandemic. He also fears nations would not be equipped to handle anything approaching that scale and we’re “worse prepared than we were before Covid” to deal with a global pandemic.
He added: “Covid is not a major pandemic on the scale that that we would even consider 1918. So if you think about the case fatality ratio of Covid, how many people died that got infected?
“It’s probably around 0.6, but 1918 was 1 to 2% and killed 100 to 200 million or 100 million people in a time when the globe was much smaller. So you you have to think that what you saw in Covid with the morgue trucks in New York City, with hospitals busting at the seams, would be much much worse even if you had something that was twice as lethal as as Covid.
“And we couldn’t even handle Covid globally, so you have to think that things could get really really grim if you had something that had much higher mortality rates, especially if for example if it was like 1918 where the average age of death was was 27.”