Study Reveals Climate Change Could Increase Likelihood Of Pandemics

Yesterday, a recent study that was published in a journal titled the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, warns that climate change could make the occurrence of pandemics more common and that the likelihood of an extremely infectious disease epidemic, similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, could triple in the coming decades.

It also noted that the chance of people seeing a pandemic, like COVID-19, during their lifetime is about 38 percent, and could double in the years to come.

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Dr. William Pan, one of the study authors and an associate professor of global environmental health at Duke University, told ABC News that the possibility of another pandemic is “going to probably increase because of all of the environmental changes that are occurring.”

Dr. Pan and his colleagues looked at data from the past 400 years to estimate the chance of extreme epidemics each year as well as death rates, the length of previous epidemics, and the rate of new infectious diseases.

“As you make that interface between humans and the natural world smaller, we just come in more contact with those things. Climate enhances the ability for viruses to infect us more easily.”