Threatened Habitats Threaten Humans

Marmots once dug their homes in deep holes across the Himalayan plateau, helping turn over the soil and creating the grassland's most important water reservoirs. Now, they are being hunted for their skins. Piles of rocks speckle the mountainsides where marmots scratched futilely against the solid rock in an attempt to escape their hunters. The grassland moisture is drying up. The plains are becoming desert.

Yesterday, I wrote that rats ("grass rats" in Chinese) had infected humans here in Qinghai with the black plague. That translation was incorrect. The vector species were marmots. Currently, it is believed that the disease took two routes of transmission: (1) street dogs eating a dead marmot and infecting goats who later died from the plague and infected the man who buried them and (2) fleas transmitted from marmots to humans during poaching activities.

China has long been known as the breeding ground for the worlds' most dangerous and widespread diseases. Each year, the US designs its flu vaccines based on new strains found in China.  Why?

One possible answer is that China has a high population of animals and humans living in close proximity to one another, often with minimal infrastructure to restrict cross-transmission of diseases.

The Chinese government and NGOs have pumped a lot of resources into improving rural infrastructure. They have installed running water projects, built clinics, manufactured solar cookers, and distributed thousands of improved stoves. Despite these admirable efforts, W. China's rates of death and illness due to water and airborne diseases remain some of the highest in the world (with unofficial numbers likely to be much much greater due to the shear difficulty of getting health care out to China's rural masses).

Perhaps the solution does not lie in infrastructure development alone. China needs doctors to staff its clinics and  public health professionals to design preventative medicine programs. It needs engineers and locals to work together to design pollution management systems which break the cycle of disease transmission and it needs scientists who can help prevent the ecosystem imbalances which have been associated with so many disease outbreaks including historical cases of the pneumonic and bubonic plagues.

Humans worldwide need to reconsider the basic way that we interact with our environment, reduce our environmental pollution, and create healthy living spaces for ourselves as well as the animals and plants upon which we depend.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.