Humans like to put the responsibility and blame of diseases and pandemics on the viruses causing the illness, or a diseased monkey that came in close contact with a human, or a civet cat being sold in a meat market. But we don’t seem to want to take any responsibility for OUR role in mass outbreaks – our behaviors, beliefs, the ways we have negatively altered the natural world, to name a few.
Without this acceptance of how humans impact and cause pandemics, we don’t stand a chance at mitigating the next one. Sabrina Sholts, curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and author of the new book, “The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from our Bodies to our Beliefs,” talks about humans' role and responsibility in diseases and pandemics.
