Is it virus, or our appetite?

Workers watch as funerals take place at The Green-Wood Cemetery, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in the Brooklyn, New York, US, on 9 April 2020Reuters

The GOT lovers all know how the mighty ‘White Walkers’ came into being. Nature tormented by the humans deployed its children to create an army. The ‘Children of Forests’ held some of the ‘First Men’ captive and pressed daggers made of dragonglass into their chest to transform them as ice-zombies that were meant to destroy the world of men.

While counting the number of deaths caused by novel coronavirus originating in China, White Walkers was the first thing that crossed my mind. While Men are busy in fighting with each other for money, power, occupation and invasion, economic exploitation, the children of forest already created the new zombie, coronavirus. The countries, its people, who have been squabbling and fighting with each other, suddenly became shocked and shaken.

Nobody knows who to fight, how to fight- to be precise, how to survive. Nature retaliates in its own way- no matter how silly it sounds. Let’s assume you are sitting in a room, enjoying some ‘exotic’ meal made of a giant crocodile or armadillo.

You suddenly see a mouse sneaking into the room. What do you do? You will kill it, for sure. It might not bite you but you know it would destroy your clothes or important files or books. You will want to get rid of it, at any cost. Now again, gather what you did to the nature. You cut its trees, destroyed its forests, killed its children (wildlife). What should the nature do to you?

It is time we rethink of our actions. We grabbed the forests and made industries, factories and destroyed hundreds of thousands of trees that give us oxygen. Wild animals are hosts of unknown virus. People all over the world are consuming all sorts of wild animals in the name of ‘exotic’ cuisine. Trying pricey dishes made of wild animals and posting photos and videos on social media is trendy.

What we do not think is, when we consume these animals, the virus and germs that recently lost their old hosts make us the new carriers. So, this is what we humans could do within our power- we could stop being stupid and ignorant and could leave the wild alone in their space and in peace.

A number of studies and research so far confirmed that coronavirus originated first from a ‘wet market’ in China’s Hubei province, that has been a hub for live and slaughtered wild animals. The entire world is on the ramp of being a graveyard just because someone had to eat a bat, armadillo or any wild animal that was the carrier of the deadly virus.

Kate Jones, the chair of ecology and biodiversity at University College London (UCL), and a team of researchers identified in 2008 that 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004, at least 60% of which came from animals.

A recent US-based study result showed about 70 per cent of the pathogens are zoonotic, meaning they at some point make the leap from animals to humans. For instance, COVID-19.

A weekly epidemiological record of World Health Organisation (WHO) published in 1996 reported the outbreak of Ebola, another deadly virus that took hundreds of lives till the date, in a remote village in Gabon. Twenty-four cases of Ebola haemorrhagic fever were reported in Mayibout II, which is located about400 km east of the capital city, Libreville. Seventeen of the infected died. The laboratory investigations were carried out by the Centre international de Recherchesmédicales in Franceville, Gabon and the WHO Collaborating Centre at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

The infection was transmitted to human body after some of the villagers reportedly carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest. Ebola, Nipah or many such viruses are transmitted through bats, monkeys, chimpanzees and other wild animals. Don’t you think we have to do something about our appetite?

It is believed that the Nipah virus broke out in Malaysia in the late 1990s from fruit bats that apparently moved from the forests into the peat farms as their natural habitation was destroyed by fires, deforestation and drought. It infected the farmers, which infected other humans and that led to the spread of the disease.

We are destroying everything around us- some by eating and some by consuming in other ways. Countries spend billions and practice austerity to afford their defence system. They develop modern weapons, ammunition and nuclear weapons and run tests of those weapons. Those experiments pollute the air, water and what not. The ecosystem collapse. The harmony of nature is ruined. Unknown virus, natural disasters and increasing sea levels are the weapons of nature.

Angry at nature? We shouldn’t be. We torment, it endures, but how long? The earth needs to breathe too. Plastic waste makes it choke. Heavy smoke is emitted from industry chimneys and vehicles. And then there are nuclear power plants. We are strangling the earth. It is fighting back in self-defence.

In a country like Bangladesh with low capacity of medical facilities, it is almost impossible to deal with the wrath of nature. The country is overly populated. But do we ever think of the consequences of what we do to nature? Even in case of indirect action that has impact on the nature? Say, we throw plastic bags, bottles or packets onto the street. Because of our careless practice, that litter clogs the drainage system and floods the roads. Last year the country saw an outbreak of mosquito borne disease, dengue, which was caused entirely because of our sheer carelessness.

What can save us now? Fear, maybe. There are two ways to win a war. We can win through a physical combat or through fear of indulging ourselves into an unnecessary fight and thus not messing with the other entity. Can we fight with the nature? Thousands of people across the world from different religions are crying for God’s mercy. Why would God take our side when we are the culprits here? He is not biased. He is responsible for saving the nature, too. It is necessary to remember for all that the skyscrapers, vertical development and ammunition with fancy names will not be able to save us from invisible pathogens and other natural calamities. The sky-high establishments are left empty now, our fancy cars have been locked in the garage for days, multi-storeyed flyovers are of no use when we are locked in our room in fear of a virus. Then look at the nature. The sky is bluer, the seas and oceans are cleaner, the ozone layer can breathe now.

Think before it is too late. Who do you think would enjoy the ‘exotic’ cuisine if nature begins to take care of our appetite? Our skeletons?

*Farjana Liakat works for Prothom Alo