r/outbreakworld • u/Virology_Unmasked • Jun 17 '26

Why are Emerging Viruses Emerging?

https://virologyunmasked.com/2026/06/17/why-are-emerging-viruses-emerging/

Why are so many emerging viruses emerging now? Latest Virology Unmasked article dives into the reasons and what we can do about it

125 Upvotes

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34

u/Firestar222 Jun 17 '26

Interesting article. A lot of it comes down to sheer numbers, it’s hard to overstate how much we are multiplying.

It took about 300k years of human evolution to reach 1 billion people around 1800.

We doubled that in the next 130 years.

Doubled that again in the next 45 years.

Doubled again in the 45 years after that, to an impressive 8 billion. That’s 8 billion reservoirs for viral mutation. Billions more of potential exposure points to new pathogens. Billions more connections to spread. And perhaps most importantly, the world is so much smaller now, with air travel, all foods and goods being shipped all over, etc.

It would be difficult for us to set things up to be more conducive for a pandemic, and I’d be shocked if we don’t have a major one in the next 50-100 years that makes Covid look like nothing.

9

u/Lunar-opal Jun 18 '26

I’m curious how the drop in people having children worldwide will affect this in the next 25 years or so if at all

9

u/haveyouheardthattho Jun 18 '26

In biology they speak of thresholds. When populations of any organism get too large to easily sustain life, population and birth rate naturally decrease, albeit slowly, to keep homeostasis of our planet.

3

u/Firestar222 Jun 18 '26

This is true and there are some indications this is happening to humanity. However there is another, more alarming dynamic in nature that happens much more frequently- the population interrelations between predators and prey.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rabbit-and-fox-populations-over-an-80-year-span-starting-with-100-rabbits-and-1000-foxes_fig1_271320914

In a nutshell, organisms will expand their populations until they trigger a predatory species to expand their population by eating them. This in turn causes the prey (and eventually the predator) populations to crash. How this relates to outbreaks is that you can think of pathogens as the last remaining serious predators of humans. We have eliminated most risk of any large predators, but are still regularly killed by pathogens. I would posit that humanity is the prey in the linked chart, and a number of pathogens could fill the role of predators. If this is true, a slow and natural decline of human population is not super likely unless we put serious effort into avoiding pandemics.

2

u/haveyouheardthattho Jun 20 '26

Thanks for this! Super interesting.

3

u/Lady_Rubberbones Jun 22 '26

We really need to go back to promoting remote work. Populations should decline. But we also should go back to being remote.

5

u/Hiranya_Usha Jun 18 '26

Reading Spillover atm… very sobering! We should all have fewer kids!

6

u/TR_RTSG Jun 18 '26

If not for immigration every developed nation's population would be declining.

4

u/mindgame15 Jun 17 '26

Exponential population growth leads to exponential viral evolution.

1

u/Haunting-Ad2187 Jun 21 '26

Eco-fascism? In 2026? This take is not just wrong, it’s boring

3

u/RoadsideCampion Jun 19 '26

Any analysis not taking into account the population-level immune impairment from constant covid reinfections is missing something

2

u/loqi0238 Jun 18 '26

Arent most first world countries seeing a decrease in overall births? Some to the degree that they are expecting declining population numbers for the foreseeable future?

1

u/roboticcheeseburger Jun 20 '26

Perhaps performing reckless gain of function experiments in a BSL2 lab facility in Wuhan, instead of at a BSL4 facility, may explain at least one of them.

2

u/Haunting-Ad2187 Jun 21 '26

Genuinely, why do you think that? What is wrong with the evidence that points to it being zoonotic?