The summary is:
The text is a transcript of a segment from John Oliver's show Last Week Tonight, where he talks about the risks of future pandemics and how to prevent them. He explains that most new infectious diseases come from animals, and that human activities such as deforestation, wildlife trade, factory farming and urbanization increase the chances of viruses jumping from animals to humans. He argues that we need to adopt a one health perspective that recognizes the interconnection between human, animal and environmental health, and invest in solutions that reduce harmful practices and improve disease surveillance. He also makes jokes about bats, crocodiles, state fairs and Paris Hilton's kinkajou. At the end, he has a mock conversation with a virus that claims to be able to spread through Zoom and cause bloody diarrhea.
Here are the key facts extracted from the text:
1. Scientists have warned us about the next pandemic long before the current one hit.
2. Up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases come from animals, called zoonotic diseases.
3. The total number of infectious disease outbreaks has increased significantly since 1980.
4. Erasing the buffer between civilization and wildlife, such as through deforestation, urbanization and mining, increases the risk of disease transmission from animals to humans.
5. Bringing wild animals into contact with us through the wildlife trade, especially for consumption, can also enable pathogens to jump from one species to another and potentially to humans.
6. Factory farming, where livestock are bred and confined in ways that can spread viruses among them more easily, is another dangerous practice that started in the US but has since skyrocketed around the world.
7. The most effective way to prevent the next pandemic would be to close down all wildlife markets, ban factory farming, stop eating meat altogether, halt deforestation and shut down all state fairs, but none of those are likely to happen.
8. Many experts argue for a one health perspective, where we recognize that the health of humans, animals and our environment are all interconnected and take that into account when making decisions.
9. There will need to be lots of smaller solutions that will look different everywhere, such as providing farmers with a phone app to flag any problems they see with their animals or regulating wildlife markets more strictly.
10. The cost of global prevention is estimated to be between 22 and 31 billion dollars a year, which is much cheaper than the cost of COVID-19 in the US alone, which is estimated to be over 16 trillion dollars.
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