Zoo vet and conservationist Dr. Sharon Deem with one of her patients.
When you hear there’s going to be a TEDxGatewayArch marathon, eight 18-minute TEDTalks in one afternoon and all of them about health care…you don’t predict a wildlife veterinarian.
But Dr. Sharon Deem of the Saint Louis Zoo is indeed one of the speakers at the April 12 event at the Sheldon. (And two days later, her colleagues will staff the Zoo's One Health Fair; see more below.)
Deem titled her TEDx talk “The Ties That Bond” — which sounds sweet, until you realize she’s talking about zoonotic diseases like swine flu and avian flu and mad cow and West Nile. Of the 1,600 emerging infectious diseases plaguing humans, 70 percent are shared with animals. And with climate change and global connectivity, those diseases are now able to spread like wildfire.
“We people, the 7.6 billion of us, need to come to grips with the realization that human health is dependent upon environmental health and animal health,” Deem says. “We’re the ones who make the changes on this planet.”
What problem would you tackle first?
The loss of biodiversity. We estimate that we are in the sixth great extinction. We are losing species at a rate up to 100 times the baseline norm. That’s a rate not seen since the loss of dinosaurs. And for the first time in the history of the planet, it’s because of humans.
So what’s lost?
Putting it into the health framework, look at all the chemicals and compounds we’ve discovered from plants and animals. Also, the ecoservice of an animal or plant that is holding the system together: pollination, seed dispersal, we don’t even know fully what this suite of living creatures are doing until they’re gone. And from the food security side of it, as we go to these monocultures and lose the diversity of seed banks, we have plants that are not genetically distinct and pathogens that can move around the planet. A whole food source can be wiped out. We don’t have the insurance policy.
Are our destinies more tightly woven now, or are we just more aware of the connections?
Both, probably. But when you look at what it takes to feed clothe and shelter 7.6 billion people, we’re in a different category than we were even 10 years ago.
And more global, and more connected.
And the speed of that connectivity! Every day we eat food from 20 to 30 countries.
What’s changed since you started practicing 30 years ago?
When I started as a wildlife vet, it was, “Deem, immobilize my elephant so I can put telemetry on it.” Then all of a sudden, ecologists were like, “Oh my gosh, why are my animals dying?” When these diseases started having population-level impacts, conservation medicine started developing. About 10 or 15 years ago, the human health people started saying,” With all these diseases associated with animals, we need to be working with the animal people.” Now people can say, “Maybe I should care that bats are dying of white nose syndrome or bee colonies are in danger. Those crazy conservationists might have a point.”
What is going on with bats?
They’re falling out of the system. In about 10 years, we have lost 6 or 7 million bats in the U.S. White-nose syndrome is a fungus. It’s native to Europe, so the bats there are just fine with it. Somebody brought it over in ’06, probably a caver. Now, if a bat eats 3,500 mosquitoes each night—each silly little bat, 3,500 mosquitoes—it’s crazy, right? Think about Zika and West Nile and all these wonderful new viruses that are mosquito transmitted…
What else worries you?
Contaminants. The poster child’s plastics. There’s a lot of interest in trying to back down on our reliance on single-use plastics, like water bottles and straws, because of the endocrine disrupters. They have feminizing qualities, and there is increasing concern for fertility. Missouri men were shown to have the lowest semen count in nine U.S. states because of our endocrine disrupters. Boy humans get upset when they hear those numbers. I’ve been looking at it from the hellbenders’ and turtles’ side—endocrine disrupters are changing sex ratios of turtles. But it’s all connected.
The TEDxGatewayArch event, Think Well: Health Care Out Loud, will be held at the Sheldon Concert Hall on April 12 from noon until 4:30 p.m. (with 10 minutes of tai chi at the break).
The One Health Fair, a collaboration of the Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Medicine with local universities on April 14. The fair will run from 9 a.m. until noon at the Saint Louis Zoo, with stations explaining issues of nature’s benefits to human health; ecosystems and habitat loss; water quality and availability; shared pathogens; climate change; and food safety.
