New Delhi: Harvard’s public health expert Professor Ashish Jha on Wednesday sounded an ominous warning, saying that the world is entering the ‘age of pandemics’.
“We are entering an age of pandemics. I am confident that this is not the last global pandemic you and I are going to see in the next 20 years,” Jha said during his videoconference talk with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Jha is a Professor of Global Health at the TH Chan School of Public Health as well as Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
“Animals are the reason for most pandemics. This novel coronavirus has existed in bats, but there was a small change probably in the genome and all of a sudden it became suitable for human hosts. I think that, I think climate change is going to make many of these things all the more worse. Then, of course, the other things that has happened with economic growth is that people are eating a lot more meat and so that also means more interactions between humans and animals,” the expert pointed out.
The Harvard professor said that life will look nothing like from five years ago. “It’s not hard to predict. But it is not faded. Meaning, we have a lot of influence over what life will look like in five years.”
During the conversation, Rahul Gandhi said that the world power equilibrium will change after the pandemic.
“I think it is going to reshape Europe. Many people won’t like what I say, but I think Europe will have a real, real difficulty staying together. I think the balance of power between the US and China will change. IPeople say that 9/11 (World Trade Centre attack) was a new chapter. This is a new book,” the Congress leader remarked.
Prof Jha opined that countries that responded the best to the coronavirus included South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, while those which responded the worst were Italy, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Welcome to the new world order. This is not how we had always envisioned things. It will have long-term repercussions and I am not sure what those are.”
IANS
