Will global warming cause the return of smallpox? This is inevitable according to researcher Juan Fueyo.
One of the deadliest consequences of global warming will very likely be the outbreak of more viral pandemics in the future. This is what the Spanish neuro-oncologist says Juan Fueyo, who has worked for decades in Houston, USA, looking for viruses that can attack brain tumors. Asked this Saturday on the Catalan channel TV3, Fueyo said that there are several reasons why climate change makes it easier to attack viruses pathogens against humans.
Frozen viruses
On the one hand, global warming will cause the reactivation of old viruses that are now frozen in places like Siberia. Fueyo cites the smallpox virus as an example: “There are corpses with the smallpox virus in Siberia, and at the moment we are not vaccinated against smallpox, which can produce a pandemic that would be millions of times more powerful than the coronavirus, and start attacking children. . ”
In this regard, the researcher explained that the spanish flu virus of 1918, which killed more than 50 million people, was found 30 years later in frozen corpses in Alaska.
Fueyo also claims thata one degree rise in temperature global average will cause mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue or yellow fever, in geographic areas so far spared.
Viruses transmitted by wild animals
The researcher also recalled that 70% of recent epidemics have been caused by deforestation, which brings viruses of wild animals together with humans. In this sense, he said that the current pandemic is the discovery that “A man who is infected with the virus from a wild animal in Thailand is a danger to the inhabitants of the whole planet”. He affirms that “Climate change and pandemics will lead us to a pre-apocalyptic situation in 10 or 20 years’ if we fail to curb global warming.
“It’s a wild virus”
Fueyo, who just published the book “Viral, the story of humanity’s eternal struggle against viruses”, took the opportunity to ensure that the coronavirus SRAS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory product: “What must be said is that this virus has never been manipulated by humans, it is a wild virus, this has been proven by sequencing the RNA of the virus in many laboratories.” For him, it’s a bat virus, “Sequencing has now demonstrated this, but we do not yet know how it got to the human species”. According to Fueyo, bats are the most common mammals in the world, and their ability to fly makes it easy to carry many viruses that do not cause them disease, but once transmitted to humans, these viruses can s be devastating in humans …
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