AFP

With the spread of monkeypox across the world coming hot on the heels of Covid-19, there are fears that increasing outbreaks of diseases that jump from animals to humans could spark another pandemic.

While such diseases — called zoonoses — have been around for millennia, they have become more common in recent decades due to deforestation, mass livestock cultivation, climate change and other human-induced upheavals of the animal world, experts say.

Other diseases to leap from animals to humans include HIV, Ebola, Zika, SARS, MERS, bird flu and the bubonic plague.

The World Health Organization said on Thursday that it is still investigating the origins of Covid, but the “strongest evidence is still around zoonotic transmission”.

And with more than 1,000 monkeypox cases recorded globally over the last month, the UN agency has warned there is a “real” risk the disease could become established in dozens of countries.

The WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan said last week that “it’s not just in monkeypox” — the way that humans and animals interact has become “unstable”.

“The number of times that these diseases cross into humans is increasing and then our ability to amplify that disease and move it on within our communities is increasing,” he said.

Monkeypox did not recently leap over to humans — the first human case was identified in DR Congo in 1970 and it has since been confined to areas in Central and Western Africa.

Despite its name, “the latest monkeypox outbreak has nothing to do with monkeys,” said Olivier Restif, epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge.

While it was first discovered in macaques, “zoonotic transmission is most often from rodents, and outbreaks spread by person-to-person contact,” he told AFP.

– Worse yet to come? –

Around 60 percent of all known human infections are zoonotic, as are 75 percent of all new and emerging infectious diseases, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Restif said the number of zoonotic pathogens and outbreaks have increased in the past few decades due to “population growth, livestock growth and encroachment into wildlife habitats”.

“Wild animals have drastically changed their behaviours in response to human activities, migrating from their depleted habitats,” he said.

“Animals with weakened immune systems hanging around near people and domestic animals is a sure way of getting more pathogen transmission.”

Benjamin Roche, a specialist in zoonoses at France’s Institute of Research for Development, said that deforestation has had a major effect.

“Deforestation reduces biodiversity: we lose animals that naturally regulate viruses, which allows them to spread more easily,” he told AFP.

And worse may be to come, with a major study published earlier this year warning that climate change is ramping the risk of another pandemic.

As animals flee their warming natural habitats they will meet other species for the first time — potentially infecting them with some of the 10,000 zoonotic viruses believed to be “circulating silently” among wild mammals, mostly in tropical forests, the study said.

Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University who co-authored the study, told AFP that “the host-pathogen network is about to change substantially”.

– ‘We have to be ready’ – 

“We need improved surveillance both in urban and wild animals so that we can identify when a pathogen has jumped from one species to another — and if the receiving host is urban or in close proximity to humans, we should get particularly concerned,” he said.

Eric Fevre, a specialist in infectious diseases at Britain’s University of Liverpool and the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, said that “a whole range of new, potentially dangerous diseases could emerge — we have to be ready”.

This includes “focusing the public health of populations” in remote environments and “better studying the ecology of these natural areas to understand how different species interact”.

Restif said that there is “no silver bullet — our best bet is to act at all levels to reduce the risk”.

“We need huge investment in frontline healthcare provision and testing capacity for deprived communities around the world, so that outbreaks can be detected, identified and controlled without delays,” he said.

On Thursday, a WHO scientific advisory group released a preliminary report outlining what needs to be done when a new zoonotic pathogen emerges.

It lists a range of early investigations into how and where the pathogen jumped to humans, determining the potential risk, as well as longer-term environmental impacts.

On a sun-blasted hillside in southeast Turkey, the world’s oldest known religious sanctuary is slowly giving up its secrets.

“When we open a new trench, we never know what to expect,” said Lee Clare of the German Archaeology Institute, who has been excavating there since 2013. 

“It is always a big surprise.”

Gobekli Tepe, which means “Potbelly Hill” in Turkish, is arguably the most important archaeological site on Earth. 

Thousands of our prehistoric ancestors gathered around its highly-decorated T-shaped megalith pillars to worship more 7,000 years before Stonehenge or the earliest Egyptian pyramids.

“Its significance is hard to overstate,” Sean Lawrence, assistant professor of history at West Virginia University, told AFP. 

Academics believe the history of human settlement began in these hills close to the Syrian border some 12,000 years ago when groups of Stone Age hunter gatherers came together to construct these sites.

Gobekli Tepe — which some experts believe was never actually inhabited — may be part of a vast sacred landscape that encompasses other nearby hilltop sites that archaeologists believe may be even older.

– Endless mystery –

None of which anyone would have guessed before the German archeologist and pre-historian Klaus Schmidt began to bring the first discoveries to the surface in 1995. 

German and Turkish archaeologists have been labouring in the sun there since, with lengthening queues of tourists now joining them to ponder its many mysteries.

When exactly it all began is even unclear. 

“Exact years are nearly impossible to verify,” Lawrence said. 

“However, the oldest Egyptian monument, the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, was built around 2700 BCE,” more than seven millennia after Gobekli Tepe.

“This was the end of what is often thought of as Stone Age hunter gatherer societies and the beginning of settled societies,” Lawrence added. 

“There remain endless mysteries surrounding the site, including how labour was organised and how the sites were used,” he said. 

Gobekli Tepe has even inspired the Netflix sci-fi psychological thriller series “The Gift”, which turns on one of the ancient inscriptions on its pillars.

Schmidt — who often wore a white traditional turban on the dig — puzzled over the megaliths carved with the images of foxes, boars, ducks, lizards and a leopard for over two decades until his early death at the age of 61 in 2014. 

– ‘Zero point in time’ –

The site was initially believed to be purely ritual in nature. But according to Clare, there is now “good evidence” for the beginning of settled life with some buildings similar to those of the same age found in northern Syria.

Turkey — which in the past has not been renowned for making the best of its vast archaeological heritage — has wholeheartedly embraced the discoveries.

The items excavated from Gobekli Tepe are shown in the impressive archaeological museum in the nearest city, Sanliurfa, which is itself so ancient that Abraham is believed to have been born there.

Indeed its new museum built in 2015 boasts “the most extensive collection of the neolithic era in the world,” according to its director Celal Uludag. “All of the portable artifacts from Gobekli Tepe are exhibited here.” 

“This is a journey to civilisation, (to the) zero point in time,” said Aydin Aslan, head of Sanliurfa Culture and Tourism Directorate.  

“Gobekli Tepe sheds light on pre-history, that’s why it’s a common heritage of humanity,” he said proudly. 

– ‘Go deeper’ –

Last year Turkey’s culture ministry boosted funding for furher excavations in the region as a part of its “Stone Hills” project, including cash for the Karahan Tepe hilltop site — around 35 kilometres from Gobekli Tepe — which some suspect is even older. 

“We will now go deeper because Gobekli Tepe is not the one and only,” Culture Minister Nuri Ersoy said last year. 

The extra funding “gives us a fantastic opportunity to compare our results from Gobekli Tepe with new sites in the Sanliurfa region of the same age,” Clare said. 

Gobekli Tepe has also breathed life back into a poor and long neglected region, which has been further hit by the civil war just across the border. Syrian refugees now make up a quarter of Sanliurfa’s population. 

Over one million tourists visited Sanliurfa in 2019 and the city expects to reach pre-pandemic levels this year. 

“Today Gobekli Tepe has started directly touching the economy of the city,” Aslan said, who hopes that its glorious past could be a key part of the city’s future. 

At the age of just 21, former engineering student Louis McKechnie has already been arrested 20 times and spent six weeks in prison.

It’s made him one of the most recognisable faces among Britain’s climate change activists.

In the last two years, he’s been part of a number of groups using increasingly radical, hard-hitting stunts to raise awareness of the issue.

After Extinction Rebellion, Animal Rebellion and Insulate Britain, McKechnie is now a full-time member of Just Stop Oil, which wants a halt to all new fossil fuel projects.

In March, he risked the wrath of football fans when he tied himself to a goalpost in the middle of a match between Newcastle and Everton.

“I was seriously terrified,” he told AFP. “It was 40,000 people screaming ‘wanker, wanker, wanker’.”

Despite feeling a “wave of guilt” at intruding on the fans’ sporting passion, he managed to halt the Premier League fixture for seven minutes.

McKechnie, who used a zip tie around his neck, said he felt vindicated.

“I was doing it for them (the fans) at the same time. Their government is lying to them and they deserve the right to know that,” he said.

One angry fan kicked him in the head but McKechnie said he didn’t feel it. Hundreds of death threats afterward though forced him off social media.

– Selfish minority – 

“I was expecting to be public enemy number one… but it’s a sacrifice I’m perfectly willing to make. We knew we wouldn’t be popular,” said McKechnie.

But he believes it was worth it, if even just a fraction of the crowd looked up Just Stop Oil online afterward to see what it is about.

“I don’t need them to agree with the tactics, just agree with the message,” he said.

Since his first direct action protest — a solo roadblock — McKechnie has disrupted the red carpet at the BAFTA awards.

He spent 53 hours 50 feet (15 metres) off the ground on the pipes of an oil terminal in Scotland and damaged pumps at a petrol station.

It was a protest blockading the London orbital motorway the M25 that landed him behind bars, along with eight other members of Insulate Britain, which campaigns for better home insulation.

He was jailed on his 21st birthday on November 17. 

The judge accused the protesters of breaking “the social contract under which, in a democratic society, the public can properly be expected to tolerate peaceful protest”.

Behind bars, though, he said two inmates approached him shortly after his arrival to say thank you.

The right-wing tabloid press has been particularly critical of the protesters, calling them “eco-anarchists” and accusing them of “sabotage”.

The Daily Mail branded McKechnie an “eco-zealot” and took aim at his long hair and aviator-style glasses, calling him a “John Lennon lookalike”.

The government now wants to bolster its legislative arsenal against the “guerrilla” techniques of what it calls a “selfish minority of protesters” for disrupting the lives of ordinary Britons.

But McKechnie said: “We’re not going to stop, because we can’t afford to. We’re more scared of the climate crisis.” 

– ‘More radical, more outrageous’ – 

McKechnie added he sees no end to the protests, as long as they remain non-violent and do not endanger lives.

“We’re not doing this because it’s fun. We’re doing this because we’re desperate,” he said.

Three decades of demonstrations and petitions have not worked, he noted.

“If things keep not working, we’re going to have to keep escalating. We’re going to have to keep getting more radical, more outrageous.

“Not because we want to, but because we have no choice.”

McKechnie is originally from Weymouth, a small coastal town in southern England that is threatened by rising sea levels.

He was still a child when his mother, a local environmentalist, studied sustainable development in lower income countries.

“A big part of her life was trying to get change through the political system and I saw her try and fail for so many years,” he said.

His father Alex, a teacher, describes his son as a “studious, thoughtful, quiet young man”. 

“He’s not a hooligan,” he told AFP.

“He’s not afraid of confrontation. He’s in the right place at the right time, and that’s very gratifying as a parent to see,” he added. 

For McKechnie, the road might be long but he’s not giving up. 

“We’re trying to educate people,” he said. “It’s working slower than we’d like but it is working.”

Italy has some spectacular beaches but the majority are private, run in an opaque and sometimes shady manner that the government has finally decided to bring into the light.

Up and down Italy’s 7,500-kilometre (4,660-mile) coastline, rows of parasols and matching sunbeds fill the sand, with only a few so-called “free beaches” dotted between them.

They provide comfort and shade from the blazing heat, but are also money-making operations, with a set of two loungers and a parasol costing up to 100 euros ($108) a day at peak periods.

Yet the concessions for the beaches have since 1992 been automatically renewed, with the result that they often pay a pittance and are subject to very little oversight — opening the door to tax fraud, mismanagement and even criminal elements.

Following years of pressure from the European Union, Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government has finally agreed to bring in a public tender system, to take effect from 2024.

Everyone who owns a concession will have to reapply, but details of how to compensate the losers for past investments in parasols, shower units and restaurants are still being ironed out.

Maurizio Rustignoli, head of the Fiba-Confesercenti, a trade union that represents beach managers, says the uncertainty is “unacceptable”.

In Fregene, a popular beach resort north of Rome, Fabio Di Vilio is the third generation of his family to run the La Scialuppa restaurant and resort.

“I think it’s fair if it’s done seriously,” he said of the reform, as he prepared the tropical-style straw parasols for the start of the season last month.

He noted the need “to ensure — if we were to go to auction — that there were no irregularities”. 

But the 38-year-old is frustrated at the lack of thought for concession-holders like him.

“You have to give security to those who have a whole history behind them, it’s not only an economic investment, it’s also a sentimental question,” he told AFP.

– ‘Not always legal’ –

Although the idea of paying to sit by the sea is an unwelcome surprise for many tourists, most Italians are used to the idea, as long as the facilities and the beach are kept clean.

“It would certainly be a good thing if there were more free beaches, provided they do not become, as we often see, a dump,” noted Luca Siciliano, 71, sunbathing on the Fregene beach.

He said it was a “good thing” to introduce more competition into the private establishments.

“Because as we know, and I’m sorry to say, behind all this sometimes there are things that are not always legal,” he said.

As often occurs in Italy, the mafia have got in on the act. 

Last month, the Italian agency that manages assets seized from organised crime groups launched a public call for tenders for a concession in Calabria, home of the ‘Ndrangheta.

And there is also the matter of undeclared revenues. Despite their number — there were just over 12,000 concessions in May 2021, according to official figures — the state only takes in 100 million euros a year from such establishments.

Beaches are managed by local authorities, and there are vast regional differences.

In 2020, 59 concessions in Arzachena, on Sardinia’s exclusive Costa Smeralda, brought in just 19,000 euros — an average of 322 euros paid by each per year, according to daily Il Fatto Quotidiano.

The government has already moved to regularise the system by introducing a minimum annual payment of 2,500 euros.

Even with this, many beach concessions are big business.

According to Il Fatto, almost 6,000 concessions monitored by the finance ministry declared average revenues of 180,000 euros a year — and two thirds failed to declare the full amount.