The biodiversity of the territories, our best protection against the Coronavirus

Currently, in the 21st century, we are living in an unprecedented moment in the entire world. We would never have imagined that a global pandemic could break out that would shake every aspect of our lives.

Covid-19 claims hundreds of lives around the world every day, leaving thousands of people with chronic health problems. The world economy has come to a standstill. Mental and sleep disorders have skyrocketed, and cultural patterns are undergoing a profound shift toward that "new normal."

But maybe they did warn us.

Scientists from all over the world began to predict these situations approximately thirty years ago, when the emergence of emerging diseases began to accelerate in different parts of the planet, with a very different level of incidence between countries and populations.

It is evident that the situation requires urgent measures. But it is not enough to look for short-term solutions, such as the competition between countries and companies to produce the best vaccine of the moment. We need to look for medium and long-term solutions that face the real consequences and, in addition, allow us to understand what is behind this great threat to humanity and the planet as a whole.

Biodiversity of the territories and proliferation of diseases

For the writing of her latest book, _“The pandemic factory”[1],_ the journalist Marie Monique Robin interviewed 62 scientists from around the world, experts in different disciplines : doctors, infectologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, parasitologists, etc.

Absolutely all of them agree on the same premise: *the pandemic we are experiencing is only the beginning of everything that is coming, and the best antidote to face the next challenges is, without a doubt, the conservation of biodiversity. *

In fact, the direct impact of the human being on the environmental imbalance has been discovered, and how the destruction of biodiversity through deforestation and the devastation of tropical forests in Africa, Latin America or Asia, are causing zoonoses [[2\ ]](#_ftn2).

In this sense, human activity seriously modifies ecosystems, which translates into alterations in fauna, flora and climate, and all of this inevitably affects us. The entire world is incredibly interconnected, and the alterations that human beings cause in the environment are returning to us in the form of diseases.

However, there are also other factors involved in the proliferation of diseases, and their characteristics vary according to countries and populations.

90% of chronic diseases are closely related to lifestyle, water, pollution, stress, exposure to antibiotics and the environment. For example, the director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon states that, in the last twenty years, the incidence of cancer in France has doubled. Meanwhile, in countries like India, the incidence continues to remain relatively low.

In this way, numerous studies show that those populations most exposed to a wide diversity of microorganisms present a greater immunological defense against the contagion and manifestation of diseases.

Research based on the impact on the intestinal flora of migrants from rural areas and native tribes to large urban centers, show that the inhabitants of these large cities, where cultural patterns and consumption habits move away from the land and acquire a style of more “artificial” life, they present a much less diverse bacterial flora than those residing in rural areas.

Despite what we might think, the mortality rate associated with Covid19 in countries with a robust health system and with greater sanitation measures, such as the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, France or Spain, is much higher than in countries in process of development. Recent research has studied the correlation of this fact with exposure to greater microbacterial diversity.

It has been shown that the diversity of microorganisms strengthens our immune system and serves as a shield against external infections. But this bacterial exposure does not come only from the food and water we ingest, but from all the microorganisms existing in the ecosystem.

Introduction to Immunobiology

In recent decades, the incidence of allergic and autoimmune diseases has accelerated exorbitantly, with special emphasis in Western countries. Many studies have tried to discover the causes of this trend, pointing to things like genetic predisposition, immune system imbalance, and environmental factors.

Immunobiology is the science that is based on the study, diagnosis and treatment of diseases associated with the immune system and, therefore, with the internal organs that regulate the body's response to the presence of external pathogenic agents (bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins, etc.).

With modernization, we have been experiencing important changes in the West that have caused a great impact in all areas of life: migration to urban areas, access to drinking water, increased sanitary measures, vaccination campaigns, controls food production, etc. All this has meant that, in addition, we have lost contact with the great diversity of microorganisms with which we used to live.

In this sense, Strachan proposed in 1989 the “hygiene hypothesis”, which maintains that the increase in chronic diseases associated with an immune imbalance could be due to the decrease in exposure to microorganisms. This hypothesis implies that the effects of modernization have ended our microbacterial diversity, and the disappearance of these organisms in the environment means that we no longer have their beneficial effects on our immune system, which makes us more prone to disease. and autoimmune disorders in Western societies.

Although this idea of hygiene is questionable, there is no doubt that it hides a great truth: biodiversity protects and strengthens us.

Preserving biodiversity is our best protection

As Marie Monique Robin affirms, it has been shown that diversity protects us: “The best antidote against the next pandemic is to preserve biodiversity”.

When ecosystems are unbalanced, the whole world gets sick. Every one of our acts of consumption carries environmental consequences in other parts of the world. In the same way that dust from the desert travels across the Atlantic to cause catastrophes on the coasts of Florida and reaches the trees of the Amazon, the use of palm oil in Europe contributes to deforestation in Indonesia.

That is why it is necessary to refer to a booming concept: “One Health”, which urges the urgent need to adopt a global vision of the health of the planet as a whole.