Zoonotic diseases that jump from animals to humans pose as big a threat to humanity as nuclear war

No one who watched the first episode of It’s A Sin, Channel 4’s new drama about the spread of Aids in the early 1980s, can have failed to register the sense of freedom and optimism that permeated an era when gay men could express their sexuality without fear for pretty much the first time in British history.

As the series progresses, of course, the story becomes much darker. It is a chilling reminder of the last time our world was confronted by a mysterious and lethal virus trailing thousands of deaths and devastation in its wake.

Of course, the Aids virus, HIV, and the Covid-19 virus are very different, not least in terms of transmission and their impact on the body. And yet there is a fundamental link between the two that has potentially catastrophic implications for the future health and survival of our ever-expanding global population — even after this present crisis is over.

That’s because both HIV and the Covid virus, along with a host of other deadly microbes, originated in animals and jumped the species barrier into humans. They are known as ‘zoonotic’ diseases.

They did so because, for a host of reasons, mankind has changed its relationship with both wild and farmed animals, destroying their habitats and crowding them together — and the process, as we shall see, is only accelerating.

This trend presents us with two vital questions: when will we really wake up to the greatest new threat of our age?

And when will we understand that — like the war on terror, the threat of nuclear war, or the climate change crisis — our battle to defeat it must become one of the globe’s top priorities?

If we fail to appreciate the seriousness of the situation, this present pandemic may be only a precursor to something far graver still.

Let us return to HIV: it was in 1981 that previously healthy young men in New York and California began presenting at hospitals with fever, flu-like symptoms and a range of rare infections and conditions. It wasn’t long before…