The World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted but, this being at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, little attention was paid even when Anna Popova, chief consumer adviser to the Russian Federation, went on TV to warn “with a degree of probability” that human-to-human transmission of H5N8 would evolve soon and that work should start immediately on developing a vaccine.
Global attention is fixed on the origins of Covid-19, either in nature or from a laboratory, but eight or more variants of avian flu, all of which are able to infect and kill humans and are potentially more severe than Covid-19, now regularly rattle around the world’s factory farms barely noticed by governments.
There have been no further reports of human H5N8 infections in 2021, but concern last week turned to China, where another type of avian flu known as H5N6 has infected 48 people since it was first identified in 2014. Most cases have been linked to people working with farmed birds, but there has been a spike in recent weeks and more than half of all the people infected have died, suggesting that H5N6 is gathering pace, mutating and extremely dangerous.
WHO and Chinese virologists have been worried enough to call on governments to increase their vigilance. “The likelihood of human-to-human spread is low [but] wider geographical surveillance in the China affected areas and nearby areas is urgently required to better understand the risk and the recent increase of spillover to humans,” said a WHO Pacific-region spokesperson in a statement.

Evidence now provides a clear warning: deforestation, degradation, and climate change are together pushing the Amazon rapidly towards a point beyond which it may not be able to recover. In the last years, political instability in the region, simultaneously affecting different countries, correlates with increasing deforestation rates in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. Around 17% of the Pan-Amazon has been deforested, with an additional 17% considered as degraded. Connections between land and rivers mean that degradation also threatens freshwater species and ecosystems. Recent research results indicated that in parts of the Amazon, the forest switches from sink to a source of carbon due to climate change, deforestation, and forest degradation. Amazonian forests are susceptible to drought and fires, while floodplain systems are vulnerable to changes in flooding regimes. Land-use changes reinforce climate change, reducing forest resilience with risks for human health, food, and water security over vast regions of South America, including its southeastern part and the Andes, and the La Plata Basin in the Southern part of the continent whose precipitation depends significantly on the Amazon.
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