Now there’s one more reason to protect animals’ natural habitats: They can prevent you from getting sick. A new study shows that as biodiversity — the diversity of species with an ecosystem — decreases, the level of infectious disease within humans increase. Growing agriculture demands, clear-cutting forests and climate change are pushing wildlife from their habitats and are driving many species to local extinction. Some estimates put the current extinction rate at anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times higher than what scientists consider the normal extinction rate based on fossil evidence. Ecologists expect the current extinction rate to increase a thousand times more over the next 50 years.
Previous studies have hinted at a link between biodiversity loss and human sickness, but the study published this week in the journal Nature provides the strongest evidence yet, says the study’s lead author, biologist Felicia Keesing of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
