Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Abraham Lustgarten at ProPublica writes—How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease:
The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.
Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed. A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.
The diseases may have always been there, buried deep in wild and remote places out of reach of people. But until now, the planet’s natural defense systems were better at fighting them off.
Today, climate warming is demolishing those defense systems, driving a catastrophic loss in biodiversity that, when coupled with reckless deforestation and aggressive conversion of wildland for economic development, pushes farms and people closer to the wild and opens the gates for the spread of disease.
Aaron Bernstein, the interim director for the C-Change Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that ignoring how climate and rapid land development were putting disease-carrying animals in a squeeze was akin to playing Russian roulette.
“Nature is trying to tell us something,” Bernstein said. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
~~Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education (1985)
TWEET OF THE DAY
He won’t quarantine himself, of course. I would settle for him being quarantined from Twitter for two weeks—MB.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—On the wrong side of America on same-sex partnerships:
Republicans are an old party, and their retrograde bigoted positions on equality are repulsive to younger voters. Obama won the youth vote 66-32, and nothing the Republicans have done since then have made them more palatable to those voters. In fact, by doubling down on hatred, Republicans are merely cementing the millennial generation into the (D) column for years to come.
So Michael, it's true that many Americans agree with the Republican position. In fact, per the polling, that number appears to be about 38 percent, or about 114 million Americans. That's a lot!
But that's not 50 percent, which is useless to you in elections, and it's a shrinking number as new youngsters reach voting age and the seniors pass on. Time is the bigot's worst enemy.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump blocks CDC from issuing reopening guidelines. We're on our own. No help is forthcoming. Greg Dworkin has a few words about that. No states ready to open, but so what? Burr looking pretty guilty. Rep. Buck taped in election fraud scheme.
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