Animal diseases could kill ’12 times as many people’ by 2050

Epidemics caused by zoonotic diseases – also known as spillovers – could be more frequent in the future due to climate change and deforestation, they warned.

Experts from US biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks called for ‘urgent action’ to address the risk to global public health.

The team’s analysis looked at more than 3,150 outbreaks between 1963 and 2019, identifying 75 spillover events in 24 countries, and focusing on historic trends for four particular viral pathogens.

These were filoviruses, which include Ebola virus and Marburg virus, SARS Coronavirus 1, Nipah virus, and machupo virus, which causes Bolivian haemorrhagic fever.

The study did not include Covid-19, which caused the global pandemic in 2020 and is thought by many to have originated in bats.

The database covered epidemics reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO), outbreaks occurring since 1963 that killed 50 or more people, and historically significant events including the flu pandemics of 1918 and 1957.

The events caused 17,232 deaths, with 15,771 caused by filoviruses and occurring mostly in Africa.

Researchers said epidemics have been increasing by almost 5% every year between 1963 and 2019, with deaths up by 9%.

‘If these annual rates of increase continue, we would expect the analysed pathogens to cause four times the number of spillover events and 12 times the number of deaths in 2050 than in 2020,’ the team said.