Ebola and Climate Change Essay

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Indigenous Environmental Issues

Ebola is increasingly becoming a salient concern due to the fact that recent outbreaks that have highlighted the risks that are associated with the disease to individual health, as well as having also highlighted the ability to the disease to spread and threaten the public health of whole societies across the globe. Given the importance of the topic, researchers have worked to attempt to determine the specific causes that allow for the spread of this disease. The research has spurred many scientific debates and theories that have arisen to explain the transmittance of Ebola. Various relevant factors have been identified as possible causal links to the spread of the disease such as deforestation and climate change.

Research Question

Ebola is a communicable disease that has the potential to spread quickly and has the potential to devastate the state of public health in virtually every population on the planet. From a public health perspective, as well as from countless other perspectives, communicable diseases have the potential to directly or indirectly impact the quality of life for all humanity. Therefore, this research will focus on the state of the current scientific literature attempt to identify the extent that environmental factors influence the spread of Ebola?

This question is relevant for environmentalists as well as the medical profession, because the spread of the Ebola virus is a great cause for concern as they predict that another such outbreak cannot be ruled out. they claim that the risks of the outbreak had been rising steadily over the last decade. The medical fraternity now claims that the risks of the outbreak were so high that it had become almost inevitable and was almost predictable (Davies, 2015). The scope of this study will be limited to secondary research that multi-disciplinary investigation that looks at the spread of Ebola from different scientific perspectives.

Literature Review

To understand the influence that the environment has on the spread of disease in general, and Ebola in specific, the changes in the state of environment should first be mentioned. According to Porter and Brown, as much as 60% of the global deforestation is caused by the conversion of forests for the purpose of subsistence and for commercial agriculture (Chasek, Downie & Brown, 2014). Commercial logging, on the other hand, results in estimated 20 to 25% of deforestation every year. Other human activities for commercial purposes like mining, planting of cash crops, cattle ranching and construction of infrastructure such as dams are thought to be the reason behind the remaining 15 to 20% of the deforestation globally. The marketing policies o various governments in Africa reflects their focus on the planting of cash crops instead of food crops and this focus or rate of planting is much more compared to the global average.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) claims that deforestation in Africa is happening at twice the world rate (Reuters, 2008). During the 1980s, 1990s and early 200s, the highest percentage of tropical forests was lost in Africa according to the FAO. This organization claims that just 22.8% of the moist forests in West Africa remain (http://news.mongabay.com, 2006). The deforestation in Africa, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, is considered a major problem and a cause of concern for environmentalists as well as for the local population. However, this problem has also been identified to be one of the contributing factors that has the potential to contribute to the rapid spread of the Ebola, the virus that killed thousands of people in Africa recently and spread to at least half of the world's geographic regions.

The fruit bats are the hosts of the Ebola virus (Ginsberg, 2014). Many scientists have postulated that deforestation could have been the responsible factors for trajectory of the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa. A section of scientists have made the argument that the destruction of forest and natural habitat is directly responsible for bringing in bats into greater contact with humans. Bats are believed to have been the source of spread of the deadly Ebola virus in humans. For example, if Ebola virus was introduced into Guinea from afar, scientists have noted that one of the most reasonable transmission theories is that it was likely introduced by a traveler was a bat (Bausch & Schwarz, 2014). Furthermore, deforestation would subsequently increase the likelihood that bats would come in contact with human populations.

The spread of Ebola virus appears to be related to environmental factors, such as particular climatic conditions, sanitation, and economic and sociopolitical phenomena that are most common among the indigenous population with low incomes; studies further revealed that outbreaks occurred mostly in forests during the rainy season (Bruce, Cur, Brysiwicz, & Cur, 2002).

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Environmentalists and researchers have documented the trend of the subsistence agriculture which has forced local populations to cut down forests. There are also documented evidence of that rampant mining activities which also the contribute to deforestation along and has accelerated with the move towards export-oriented large-scale logging.

These activities have also been correlated with increased emissions that contribute to climate change. Furthermore, climate change has been also have been shown to increase the likelihood of the spread of diseases such as Ebola through the transmission driven through conditions conducive to insect, rodent growth and redistribution as well as the increase in water borne diseases (Epstein, 2001). The medical fraternity now claims that the risks of the outbreak were so high that it had become almost inevitable and was almost predictable through the changes in the environmental conditions (Davies, 2015). The solution to this problem is complex and multifaceted. Africa represents a small fraction of the total emissions that contribute to climate change. However, on the other hand, African countries could theoretically address deforestation to a greater or lesser extent. However, given the fact that a bulk of this trend is due to the fact that subsistence farming plays a large role in the indigenous population, the policy makers will have to work diligently to also address social justice issues and the distribution of factors such as income and wealth before such a practice could reasonably be expected to be curtailed.

However, there have also been many alternative theories that lie outside of the mainstream literature regarding the origins of Ebola and have been widely hailed as "conspiracy theories." For example, The Daily Observer, a Liberian newspaper, alleged that the virus was a bioweapon designed by the United States military to depopulate the planet (Feuer, 2014). Other theories place the motivation for the outbreak as an opportunity to make a profit on cures, to power grabs by shadowy organizations, and scientific errors. Although these stories are criticized in the mainstream press, there are elements of truth in many of these theories that allow them to be plausible at the least.

For example, the state of science and technology has made the possibility of biotechnological accidents to occur and there are also many agencies that have developed, or are developing, biological weapons. For instance, researchers such as Horowitz (1998) was deliberate and unambiguous when he explained the threat of new diseases in his text, Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional and claims that he had confirmed the existence of an American Military-Medical-Industry that conducts biological weapons tests under the guise of administering vaccinations to control diseases and improve the health of "black Africans overseas" (Broderick, 2014). While many of these alternatives are simply not able to be either confirmed or denied, the plausibility of some of the claims of the theories have allowed them to gain popularity with many people.

Methodology

To determine the current state of the scientific literature, a literature review was conducted in a multi-disciplinary fashion to examine evidence from multiple fields. From the structured investigation, the evidence from these sources seem to agree and there are multiple sources that cited that transmittable diseases, including Ebola, are driven by changes in the environment, primarily through deforestation and the effects of climate change, that contribute to the interaction between humans and different species which can transmittal mechanisms between species.

This research was carried out using a meta-analysis of different fields that are relative to the factors that are contributing the rise and spread of a communicable disease such as Ebola. Such an analysis can provide insights to the current state of the literature and various developments in advancements in research. The advantage to using such a method is that it can provide a wide sample of various theories that are evidence based.

The limitations to this methodology is that it is not exhaustive and only highlights a brief number of theories from many different perspectives. Therefore, the sample of ideas are fairly limited and do not show the development of these how these theories came to be, in the broad sense. Furthermore, they are limited to basically snapshots of selected arguments or research efforts and cannot fully explain the methodologies used for the sake of time. As a result, such a methodology cannot be….....

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