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Number of pandemics likely to grow

Regina Phelps, founder of Emergency Management & Safety Solutions, has been a pandemic planner for 22 of the 38 years she’s been in business helping clients cope with crises. Phelps said her clients, which are almost all major U.S. corporations outside of sports, rarely took the possibility of a global pandemic seriously until recent developments.

 

“That it took us this long to get a major illness is kind of amazing to me,” she said. “I think we’ll have more of these.”  

Phelps

A disease outbreak becomes a pandemic when it spreads to multiple countries and continents. The COVID-19 pandemic is at least the ninth pandemic of the 21st century, and, with more than 11.5 million cases worldwide, the second largest. H1N1, also called swine flu, was the largest when it infected more than 60 million globally between 2009 and 2010.  

“History suggests that as the world has become a more crowded place, and people (and animals) interact more closely and widely globally, the number and rate of future pandemics seem likely to increase,” said Dr. Stephen Hawes, professor and chair of the University of Washington’s epidemiology department.

Scientists and researchers cite climate change, deforestation and intensified agriculture as three factors increasing zoonotic disease transmission between animals and humans. All three issues speak to a diminished buffer between the two, leading to new diseases never seen before in human populations, like COVID-19. A more internationally interconnected world population only exacerbates the difficulty of preventing disease outbreaks from becoming pandemics. 

A study published in June’s edition of the journal Environmental Science and Policy claimed that 60% of infectious diseases affecting humans today originated from animals, including SARS, the H1N1 virus, MERS, Ebola, Avian Flu and the Zika virus. Each is among the 21st century’s pandemics, and each is zoonotic in origin. COVID-19 has now joined that list and has the largest geographic spread of any of those seven illnesses, though H1N1 also had a global footprint. Hawes said he would add seasonal influenza (the flu) and the HIV epidemic, which peaked in the early 2000s, to round out the unofficial list of nine 21st century pandemics.

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