Pestilence and famine: Continuing down the vicious cycle with COVID-19

Sudipta Hyder, Rethy K Chhem, Filip Claes and Erik Albert Karlsson

PLOS Pathogens, 2022, vol. 18, issue 10, 1-6

Abstract: Despite the fact that we produce enough food to feed everyone on Earth, world hunger is on the rise. On the other side of the table, the obesity crisis also weighs heavily. Malnutrition is less about food than about socioeconomic factors such as conflict, poverty, and global disasters such as climate change and the novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Nutrition and infectious disease exist in an intricate dance. Adequate and balanced nutrition is critical for appropriate response to infection and any changes in the balance can serve as a tipping point for the next pandemic. On the other hand, pandemics, such as COVID-19, lead to greater malnutrition. Both over- and undernutrition increase severity of disease, alter vaccine effectiveness, and potentially create conditions for viral mutation and adaptation—further driving the disease and famine vicious cycle. These long-term health and socioeconomic repercussions have direct effects at individual and global levels and lead to long-term consequences. Therefore, investing in and strengthening public health, pandemic prevention, and nutrition programs become vital at a much more complex systems level.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1010810 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article/fi ... 10810&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:ppat00:1010810

DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1010810

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Pathogens from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plospathogens ().