The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Serge Morand; Bruno Andreas Walther

While the latter is possible in crisis situations, it cannot be a long-term solution to the quandary of the increased infectious disease risk of the Anthropocene unless we want to decrease our total global mobility (see scenario 3 below). Therefore, much improved identification and isolation infected hosts may be the way forward. Already, such measures have been adopted during the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, e.g., body temperature checks for every air travel passenger even though they appear to be ineffective (Cohen and Bonifield, 2020) . However, if efficient and reliable health checks which can identify various diseases and which can be administered relatively timeand cost-efficiently to large numbers of passengers could be implemented, we may be able to significantly restrict the mobility of infected hosts. While such a proposal may sound like "pie in the sky" at the moment, rapid advances in diagnostic techniques, such as translational proteomics, may soon allow us to identify infected hosts using simple breathalyzer, saliva, or urine tests (Athlin et al., 2017; Nakhleh et al., 2017; Tao et al., 2019; Zainabadi et al., 2019) . Furthermore, hygienic measures, such as the enforcement of handwashing and the wearing of facemasks in public . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https: //doi.org/10.1101 //doi.org/10. /2020 transport hubs, complete and regular disinfection of important traffic hubs and vehicles (including the air and all surfaces), and much better vector control should become mandatory global standards of public health (e.g., Grout and Speakman, 2019; Nicolaides et al., 2019 , reviewed in Huizer et al., 2015 , especially in the most central of traffic hubs, such as the world's most connected airports (Guimerà et al., 2005; Bajardi et al., 2011) . Such measures would certainly help to decrease the mobility of infected hosts and thus the transmission and global spread of diseases.