Covid-19 Is Just the Beginning of the War on Viruses Zoonotic spillover — when diseases jump between animals and humans — will happen more and more frequently as habitats are changed by global warming.

Nearly three dozen people in China have been sickened by a newly identified virus.”

Nope, that isn’t a throwback to 2020. Scientists have identified a new virus named Langya henipavirus, or LayV. The good news is that we’re talking about just 35 cases since 2018, and it doesn’t look like human-to-human transmission is possible (shrews It’s thanks to an early warning system that we know about this virus, but that doesn’t mean we can relax. LayV is just another example of zoonotic spillover, where pathogens jump between animals and humans. Around 60% to 75% of our infectious diseases are derived from pathogens that started off circulating in another part of the animal kingdom. If there’s a new pandemic, you can bet it’ll be a zoonotic disease.

The problem is that zoonotic spillover is happening more frequently. Andreas Kluth has called it one of the greatest dangers to humanity. As the planet warms, and humans encroach further and further into wildlife habitats, animals — including ourselves — will come into close contact with species new to them. That gives pathogens an incredible opportunity to mingle and evolve and eventually make the jump to humans. One recent paper can give us a number: In the most conservative warming scenario, another 15,000 viruses will hop among 3,000 mammal species by 2070. Things are already accelerating, as this dataset of the top 100 zoonotic outbreaks and 200 randomly chosen outbreaks show: thought to be natural carriers of the virus).