Environmental chemistry is most relevant to study coronavirus pandemics
Résumé
On May 18, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has globally killed 315,248 people since the virus outbreak in Wuhan, China, in early December 2019. As a matter of urgency, research has promptly focused on designing cures and vaccines, which is understandable, but is the classical ‘painkiller’ approach that will be less and less efficient in our globalized society because such an approach is treating the effect and not the original cause (Lichtfouse 2009, 2010). In particular, this is somehow underestimating environmental factors such as climate change and pollution that have more or less directly favored the pandemic. For instance, climate modeling has predicted increased risks of food- and waterborne diseases with very high confidence (Woodward et al. 2014). Similarly, air pollution has been shown to alter the immune system (Glencross et al. 2020; Bauer et al. 2012). Environmental chemistry, as the science of contaminants in the environment, thus deserves more attention to prevent future pandemics (Qu et al. 2020).
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