Zoonoses Fundamentals: What We Included And What We Left Out

Today marks the release of the latest edition in our Fundamentals series, looking at zoonoses — that is, diseases that are passed from animals to people. It’s a large topic that’s on the minds of many people, as COVID-19 has highlighted the potential danger inherent in zoonoses. Indeed, virtually all pandemics faced by humans throughout history have their origins in animal hosts. From the plague, to new forms of influenza, to the novel coronavirus, before these diseases make the jump to humans, they mutate and are incubated in animals.

One thing we make clear in our resource, however, is that animals should not be seen as the culprits. Non-human primates, birds, bats, rodents, insects, and companion animals do not spread disease intentionally or with malice. Instead, our focus is on how humans help to create the conditions that not only allow these diseases to grow stronger, but allow them to jump from animals to humans. Intensive animal agriculture and the wildlife trade are two multi-billion dollar industries, and they are responsible for some of the biggest pandemics to date.

In putting our Fundamentals series together, however, we always run into one major problem: deciding what to include and what to leave out. While we were able to take a relatively broad view with our Zoonoses Fundamentals, there are still places where we chose to focus our efforts most intently. Below, we look further into the corners that we chose not to illuminate as brightly this time around.

What We Included

If you’re looking for an overview of the major issues related to animals and disease spread, look no further! The Zoonoses Fundamentals have you covered with public opinion data, market research statistics and much more. When you’re ready, click through to check out the full resource.

What We Left Out

Considering the amount of information and data that are circulating about COVID-19 in particular, we could have made this resource much more focused on the coronavirus. In fact, we could have probably released a COVID-19 Fundamentals instead, and been well-stocked with data, charts, and research. The current outbreak has certainly resulted in a great deal of advocacy about ending the wildlife trade, and making links between animal agriculture and zoonoses. However, we felt it was important to look beyond the fervor around the current outbreak, and outline the mechanics of how zoonoses work — how they originate, how they spread, and what our role is at various stages of the process. In that sense, the novel coronavirus is treated as one case study of many that we look at throughout the piece.

Fortunately, when it comes to COVID-19, Faunalytics doesn’t want to leave you without the knowledge to be an informed advocate. That’s why we put together this blog post that will help you “weather the storm.” It contains links to public opinion research, analysis, and so much more.

The second thing we left out — or rather, decided to set aside for the purposes of clarity and focus, was the various ways that people combat zoonoses once they’re out in the world. We didn’t look at vaccines and other treatments, we didn’t look at distancing and mitigation measures, and perhaps most importantly for animal advocates, we didn’t look at the ripple effects that can result from disease outbreaks, including things like mass animal culls. This is obviously a very important aspect of what happens during and after a pandemic, and you can find out more about these issues here, here, and here. On a related note, we also didn’t highlight the role that meatpacking plants have played in the spread of COVID-19. While this has been an important aspect of the current outbreak, it was unclear for us how we could link it to larger patterns of past outbreaks. As we do more research, these two related issues may be included in a future iteration of the Zoonoses Fundamentals.

Finally, something we left out that’s present in a lot of resources about zoonoses is more of an explanation of how diseases work, how they spread between people, and the basic things you can do to protect yourself from infection. The basics of how viruses and bacteria work in the human body are important, and we encourage you to continue to stay tapped in with reliable and verified sources to get this information. In this case, however, they were secondary to the main goal of the piece: how humans help spread zoonoses through our larger activities of industrial agriculture, the wildlife trade, deforestation, urban encroachment, and more.

We hope you find our Zoonoses Fundamentals useful for your own education, and in your advocacy. As always, get in touch with us if you have suggestions for how we can improve this resource, or future editions of our Fundamentals series on other topics.