By Vanessa Bauza
December 5, 2023
In new TED talk, doctor prescribes conservation
4 min
“I am a medical oddity — I’m a doctor who specializes in saving forests.”
While it may seem unusual for a medical doctor to work for a conservation nonprofit, Vora’s work centers on a powerful premise: that human health and the protection of nature are inextricably linked. This idea has not received much attention — but Vora hopes the popularity and influence of TED talks might change that.
“My main message is that our health cannot be separated from the health of the planet,” said Vora, who has devoted his career to chasing infectious diseases — from Ebola-stricken villages in West Africa to New York City, where he led a COVID-19 contact tracing program with more than 3,000 staff during the pandemic.
“I wanted to do this TED talk to help people see how our health as humans is connected to the health of animals and nature more broadly,” he told Conservation News. “People need nature to survive, and with everything we do to protect nature, we are also protecting ourselves.”
“Some researchers believe the West African Ebola epidemic began with an axe,” Vora says in his TED talk, released on Tuesday. “Communities in rural Guinea, for their survival, had no choice but to clear forests for farms. Then, in 2013, an 18-month-old boy died of Ebola. He’s believed to have caught the virus from bats that lived in a hollow tree where he played. Put another way, the virus likely spilled over from bats to the boy, making him ‘patient zero.'"
“Ebola’s animal origins, however, aren’t unique,” Vora continues. “All five viral pandemics from 1918 through 2009 can be traced to animals — and the same is likely true for COVID.”
Since joining Conservation International as a pandemic prevention fellow in 2021, Vora has begun to put this issue squarely on policymakers’ radars — advocating for increased funding and strategies that focus on protecting nature to prevent outbreaks.
“There is no human health, or animal health, or environmental health;” Vora says, concluding his TED talk. “They are one and the same.”
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