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by forkexec 2298 days ago
For bacteria, antibiotic resistance is a big deal and aggravated by routine oversubscribing and meat agriculture. We need more antibiotics and phages quickly.

For fungi and yeast, there aren't enough antimycotics and they too are overused. We need more antimycotics and phages quickly also.

For viruses, meat agriculture, forest destruction and urban sprawl are contributory factors leading to faster mutations and jumping species eventually into us. It would be nice to have a mostly automated vaccine development lab system that can assemble and test thousands of compounds simultaneously.

1 comments

>For viruses, meat agriculture, forest destruction and urban sprawl are contributory factors leading to faster mutations and jumping species eventually into us.

At this point you have to acknowledge that cultural factors are responsible for the majority of modern outbreaks. We know about the meat markets in China. They are as endemic as the viruses to the various animals they eat. No other country on Earth has originated this many animal to human outbreaks.

This is not an environmental issue.

> No other country on Earth has originated this many animal to human outbreaks.

I am ignorant, what is the data here? Which animal-to-human outbreaks are we counting?

The top animal-derived epidemics I can think of would be: SARS and 2019-nCoV from china, H1N1 had mixed heritage, MERS seemed to come from the middle east, Ebola and HIV from africa. So, pretty spread out?

Also, China is substantially larger than everything else but India, so wouldn't this be an expected outcome anyway?

For decades it's been reported in the US press that the seasonal flu outbreak comes from small farms raising pigs in rural China.

So start by googling that for each year.