Each plant has its own growing area and environment, and their reproduction or their toxicity is formed by adapting to nature or self-protection. They are bounded and limited by natural conditions. When people inadvertently or intentionally introduce certain plants into another environment, they may be like the monsters that open Pandora's box, lose their restraint, lose their natural enemies, and deliberately create disasters in different places.
China has found more than 400 exotic plants to form disasters of varying sizes. Such as ragweed, kudzu, fake sorghum, Canadian goldenrod, rice grass, water hyacinth and other floods, become a malignant herb that harms crops and other forests. These plants are strong, vigorously breeding, and some are toxic, they rob the nutrients of other crops cause their death. In some areas of the tropics and subtropics, annual crop yields due to malignant weeds are reduced by as much as 50%. Some plants, though not grown in abundance, are extremely toxic, causing many people and herbivores to eat and kill the yellow springs, such as poisonous mushrooms. There are even more strange plants. The addictive substances extracted from them are poisoned by hundreds of millions of people and are difficult to be released. Tobacco, coca, marijuana and poppy are such plants, but they are originally very beneficial plants. Making drugs is purely a disaster for human beings themselves.
Microbial disasters are the most direct and horrific disaster. These finest and most primitive pathogenic microorganisms can spread disease in a variety of ways, causing death in humans or other animals. According to rough statistics, about 1000 kinds of pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, rickettsia, spirochetes, and parasites threaten human life. Every outbreak and epidemic of infectious diseases caused by them has brought disaster to mankind. In the 14th century, the plague outbreaks in Europe and Asia, the 18th century European smallpox, tuberculosis, the 1918 global influenza pandemic, the death toll was in the millions or even tens of millions, surpassing any other natural disaster.
Since the birth of mankind, people have been fighting various diseases. People use various drugs or other means to kill pathogens and block the spread of infectious diseases. However, "the road is one foot high, and the magic height is one foot." Various pathogens are constantly changing their faces. After adapting to the old drugs, they are coming back with more vicious faces. This is the case with the flu that occurs almost every year. This virus makes people's new vaccines always lag behind its mutations. In addition, some new pathogens continue to bring people with infectious diseases that they have never seen before. The "SARS" epidemic that shocked the world in 2003 has brought great fear to the Chinese people. People have not completely solved the mystery of this terrible plague. Nowadays, more than 200 kinds of infectious diseases have been controlled and treated, but they have occasionally outbreaks in some local areas. For example, cholera, tuberculosis, dengue fever, malaria and so on are still causing the catastrophe of life. There are still some diseases, and people still have no effective treatment methods, such as AIDS and Ebola.
In addition to direct harm to humans, some pathogens can cause disease and death to livestock and other animals, indirectly ausing disasters to humans. The fear of mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth disease, bird flu, swine fever, rabies, etc. are prevalent, and the mortality rate is extremely high, causing huge losses. Some of the livestock diseases can also be infected and given to people. The H5N1 and its subtype variants of the avian flu virus are the most dangerous viruses that are currently being urgently guarded around the world. Some scientists predict that once the virus spreads in the population, it is likely to cause disastrous consequences like the global Spanish flu of 1918.
Among the various disasters encountered by mankind, the plague is the greatest disaster, which seriously interferes with the historical process of mankind. William McNeil's Plague and Humans describes this. In the long river of history, smallpox, plague, cholera, typhoid and malaria have long been raging. In the face of the plague, people tend to be helpless, and the length of the plague is almost unbelievable, sometimes up to two or three centuries. Therefore, the death of the population caused by the plague is shocking. In European history, the most serious plagues are smallpox and plague. In 1348-1351, the Black Death (plague) killed tens of millions of people in Europe. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe had more than 100 million people who died from smallpox. During the contact between the old and new continents, most of the Native American Indians became victims of many pathogens such as smallpox, typhoid fever, dysentery and syphilis carried by white people. The sharp decline of the indigenous population led to the rapid disintegration of the Aztec and Inca Empires. , clearing the way for the colonial expansion in Europe. Australian Aborigines were almost extinct after the arrival of whites. The most recent plague worldwide is the 1918 flu, which killed at least 20 million people worldwide. The SARS that ravaged the spring and summer of 2003 and the plague in history cannot be equal. Although it has been controlled in a short period of time, we must not be blindly optimistic that human beings can overcome the virus in the future. In recent years, emerging viruses such as HIV, Ebola, Nipah and SARS have reminded us that the destruction of forest swamps, invasive animal habitats, and indiscriminate hunting of wild animals have caused fire to humans. One of the best ways for humans to protect themselves is to respect nature and not to deliberately destroy the biological barriers of nature.
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