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GLOBAL WARMING, VIRUSES AND AEROSOLS PDF Stampa E-mail

Letter to British Medical Journal 2022
Dear Editor,
Two years ago, on the occasion of "World Environment Day", Pope Francis asked himself and all of us the following question in a letter addressed to the President of Columbia: "How can we hope to live healthy in a sick world?".
The Pope's query, posed in the middle of the dramatic CoViD-19 pandemic, reminds us that our lives are inextricably linked with those of all the other human (and non-human) beings; it also carries an implicit, additional invitation for the Scientific Community to work in a multidisciplinary fashion, in tight agreement with the "One Health" concept/principle.
Noteworthy, 2021 has been the hottest year ever recorded on Earth throughout the last 140 years, being preceded in turn by the six warmest years in a row from 2015 to 2020 (Nature).
A number of infectious agents displaying a strong resistance in the external environment may utilize the progressively increasing global temperatures to their benefit. This appears to be especially true for African swine fever virus (ASFV) - a non-zoonotic pathogen - as well as for monkeypox virus (MPV) - a zoonotic pathogen - two DNA-viruses which have become very popular in recent times and that have been well known for many years by us Veterinarians, while also sharing, at the same time, a prominent environmental resistance (Rheinbaben et al, 2007; Mazur-Panasiuk et al., 2019).
Within this framework, the possibility that winds, currents and other metereological phenomena could carry - even for long distances - the two aforementioned and other viral and non-viral agents away from the site into which they were shed out of one or more infected hosts should be carefully evaluated and assessed in future studies.
By doing so, in fact, we could better dissect the infection/disease source(s) in a number of cases and outbreaks characterized by an unclear, if not obscure, origin. This is the case of some more or less recent ASFV outbreaks among wildboars, alongside some very recent MPV cases in people.
Furthermore, provided we are dealing with a viral pathogen highly impacting animal (swine) health (ASFV), as well as with a viral agent with a well-recognized zoonotic potential (MPV), it is difficult to understand why Veterinarians have been so marginally involved - at least in Italy - in the mass-media's representation of "what's going on" and, no less important, of the "state-of-the-art" of the scientific knowledge hitherto achieved about ASFV and MPV infections.
In other words, we are repeating the same mistakes already seen in the course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, when not even one single Veterinarian was appointed for two consecutive years, in my Country, as a member of the "Scientific and Technical Committee against CoViD-19" (popularly known by the acronym "CTS"), as previously reported by myself in The BMJ (Di Guardo, 2021).
(F: G. Di Guardo, BMJ 2022; 377:o1239)