**7. The last decades warnings about future pandemics**

According to a 2008 *Nature* paper, emerging infectious diseases, dominated by zoonoses, "are increasing significantly over time", with "the emergence of 335 infectious diseases between 1940 and 2004" and "reflecting a large number of drug-resistant microbes [19]". The most commonly cited reasons for this increase are the environmental issues, such as overlapping of habitats due to the agricultural intrusion in the ecosystems [20–22] or the global warming [23, 24] and urban heat islands [25, 26].

During the last decades, there was such concern about the zoonotic diseases impact that the COVID-19 pandemic seems the precise illustration: "**Virtually every expert on influenza believes another pandemic is nearly inevitable, that it will kill millions of people, and that it could kill tens of millions**—and a virus like 1918, or H5N1, might kill a hundred million or more—and that it could cause economic and social disruption on a massive scale. This disruption itself could kill as well. Given those facts, every laboratory investigator and every public health official involved with the disease has two tasks: first, to do his or her work, and second, to make political leaders aware of the risk. The preparedness effort needs resources. Only the political process can allocate them [27]." In the 2016 United Nations *Environment Programme* report about the "Emerging Issues of Environmental Concern", zoonosis arrived second out of the six issues [28]. In 2018, WHO estimated that "another influenza pandemic is inevitable but unpredictable [1]".
