Wildlife biodiversity a boon to human health, seafood nutrition
April 6, 2021
WASHINGTON – Biodiversity provides human health benefits on the land and in the water, according to a pair of newly published studies.
Previous studies have highlighted many of the ways biodiversity offers indirect benefits to human health by encouraging pollination, for example. But new research suggests biodiversity also provides direct health benefits by keeping humans from getting sick, United Press International (UPI) reported.
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According to one new study, published Monday in the journal PNAS, biodiversity helps minimise the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks.
There’s a persistent myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity are hotspots for disease, UPI quoting lead study author Felicia Keesing said in a press release.
Want to avoid new pandemics? Preserving biodiversity is step one, research argues
The more diversity we have in nature, the better for our health.
A growing body of evidence is already showing that preventing new pandemics like COVID-19 will require addressing biodiversity loss from human activities such as deforestation and agriculture. Now, a new study has synthesized the current understanding of how biodiversity affects human health and why it’s so important to preserve and protect it.
Image credit: Flickr / Ali Rajabali.
Felicia Keesing, a Bard College professor and lead author of the paper, says it’s a myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity represent hotspots for diseases. The more animal diversity, the more pathogens the myth goes. But this is plain wrong, Keesing says. Biodiversity itself isn’t a threat, quite the contrary: it protects us from the species that carry pathogens.
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IMAGE: Ecosystems with a diversity of mammals, including larger-bodies and longer lived creatures like foxes, are better for our health. view more
Credit: Ali Rajabali / Flickr
A growing body of evidence suggests that biodiversity loss increases our exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens. Restoring and protecting nature is essential to preventing future pandemics. So reports a new
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (
PNAS) paper that synthesizes current understanding about how biodiversity affects human health and provides recommendations for future research to guide management.
Lead author Felicia Keesing is a professor at Bard College and a Visiting Scientist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She explains, There s a persistent myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity are hotspots for disease. More animal diversity must equal more dangerous pathogens. But this turns out to be wrong. Biodiversity isn t a th
How our abuse of nature makes pandemics like covid-19 more likely
From habitat degradation to squalid animal treatment, our part in allowing “zoonotic” diseases like covid-19 to leap into humans is becoming ever clearer Health 3 March 2021
Selman Hoşgör
RELEASED from quarantine in a hotel in Wuhan, China, this January, Peter Daszak made for the wildlife market linked to the first cases of a mystery pneumonia in the closing days of 2019. Back then, the Huanan seafood market was a jostling scrum of stalls selling not just seafood, but all manner of domestic and exotic wild animals, the living cheek by jowl with the dead.