Clear-Cutting Disease Control

The vector-borne Zika virus joins other infections, such as avian influenza, Ebola, and yellow fever, as a recent public health crisis threatening pandemicity. A growing literature attributes the origins of many of these emergent outbreaks to changes in land use, spearheaded by agricultural production as well as mining, logging, and other modes of multinational development. Ecosystems in which 'wild' viruses are in part controlled by environmental stochasticity are being drastically streamlined by deforestation and deficits in public health and environmental sanitation. Consequently, a subset of infections that once burned out relatively quickly in the forest with their host species are now propagating across susceptible human populations whose vulnerability to infection is often exacerbated in urban environments. The resulting outbreaks are characterized by greater extent, duration, and momentum. This book discusses two key but opposing causes of vector-borne outbreaks - deforestation and urbanization - and proposes that these two impacts together explain the explosive spread of recent vector-borne infections. Stripping out forest for monoculture production or divesting from sanitation removes ecological curbs on vector-borne diseases. Similarly, the environmental 'noise' or effect of urbanization and urban movement alters vector dynamics, leading to infection spikes. In addition, an agri-business-led 'frontier' spreading across much of the global South, in combination with structural adjustment programs in public health, appears to remove the ecosystemic brake on vector-borne infections and accelerates their subsequent transmission.