Epidemics have existed in the past, but recent trends show that their number and frequency are increasing. Serge Morand, a health ecologist at CNRS and CIRAD, and author of the book “La prochaine peste” (The next plague), notes that “at the global level, the number of epidemics has increased more than tenfold between 1940 and today ”. Thus, since 1940, although the Covid-19 epidemic is one of the few, after AIDS and Asian flu (H2N2), to reach this global scale and become a pandemic, it may well not be the last. In an op-ed published in Le Monde on 17 April, 16 heads of French research organisations, members of the Alliance Nationale de Recherche pour l’Environnement (National Research Alliance for the Environment - AllEnvi), look at the causes of the proliferation of epidemics, and especially of zoonotic diseases**, and call for greater efforts towards global health, integrating the health of ecosystems (whether cultivated or natural), plants, animals and humans.

The authors underline the role played by humans in the emergence and spread of new viruses. “This is […] a human disturbance of the environment, and of the human-nature interface, […] amplified by the globalisation of trade and of lifestyles, which accelerates the emergence of viruses that are harmful to human populations through recombination between viruses of different species ”.

Full text available here: https://www.cirad.fr/en/news/all-news-items/press-releases/2020/origines-epidemie-coronavirus