By October 2019, the fires in Amazon have burned over 7,600 square kilometers marking its unprecedented destruction in the world's largest rainforest.
This year is no better than last year, and experts at NASA's Global Fire Emissions Database project said that it had exceeded last year's record. Also, 2020 had recorded damages that it is even worse than the 2012 fires when the satellite was first used.
In July this year, a previous report from Science Times said that the deforestation rate has increased by 25% over the past year. Also, the INPA said that last month's fires on the Amazon rainforest had doubled the rate of 2019.
But perhaps due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the massive increase in the deforestation of the Amazon was given less international attention. Yet, deforestation continues that has caused profound consequences on climate and global health.
The Next Pandemic in the Making?
Last month, experts urged the governments to invest in the prevention efforts to prevent another pandemic coming from animals to happen again. But with the farmlands expanding into the Amazon rainforest, researchers said that it might open a new way for pandemic diseases to emerge, AlJazeera reports.
Changes in the world's largest rainforest drive the animals, from bats to mosquitos, into new areas could increase interactions with humans as people move deeper into the forest which then increases the risk of viral or bacterial transmission of diseases between species, according to researcher Adalberto Luis Val from the National Institute for Research in Amazon (INPA).
Moreover, he said that climate change could also increase that risk driving high temperature and rainfall changes in the rainforest.
"There is a great concern because ... there is a displacement of organisms. They try to adapt, face these new challenging scenarios by changing places," Val said.
He added that the Evandro Chagas Institute, a public health research organization, has identified 200 different types of viruses inside the Amazon in which 37 can be transmitted to humans, and 15 has the potential to cause the next pandemic.
These viruses include those encephalitis varieties, West Nile fever, Rocio, and Brazilian virus from the same family that caused yellow fever. But Val is more worried about the arboviruses that can be detected in insects like mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus and dengue.
Read Also: Brazilian Amazon Deforestation Increased to 25%, Official Data Showed
Spillover Effect
A spillover effect happens when there is an interaction between the primary host to the secondary host, although this rarely happens. The virus has to break through barriers to successfully infect another species different from its primary host.
The current surge of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest could be the exact phenomenon needed for spillover to happen giving birth to a new pandemic wherein viruses or bacteria could jump to different species, according to Cecilia Andreazzi, a researcher at the major public health institute in Brazil named Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
Brazil has already seen spillover warnings with the growing problem of the emergence of diseases, such as the Brazilian hemorrhagic fever, rodent-carried hantaviruses, and oropouche, which is a mosquito-transmitted arbovirus.
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