9 hours ago, Slvkguy said:

I fully expect I will see more pandemics in my lifetime….and I’m not young.  diseases we thought were gone may very well come roaring back to life in new ways.
that’s why the casual discussions around bareback sex are so frightening. As an example - In the last 2 years, the US CDC guidance in treating gonorhrea & chlamydia have radically changed because the new strains are much more difficult to treat.  These once easily treatable infections are mutating and building resistance to antibiotics.  There will come a point where they may no longer be treatable.

I am as sure as I can be that you are correct. We also need to remember that many diseases - minor as well as major - are jumping the species barrier. HIV is known to have crossed from a species of chimpanzee to humans in The Congo in the 1920s. SARS in 2003 is known to have crossed from the animal population in China's Guangdong Province to humans. Although the first known cases were discovered in Hong Kong, it is known that a visitor from Guangdong had brought the virus from China where there may well have been earlier cases which the local medical community could not diagnose. MERS in 2015 was another. Now we have covid, another crossover.

Part of the problem is that in some parts of the world humans live in very close contacts with animals - sometimes with animals at ground level and humans living above. The emergence of SARS amazed the medical community. Previous coronavirus infections were generally mild with a long incubation period. SARS was an illustration of what veterinary scientists had been suggesting for some time: that there was the potential for these viruses to kill animals and even  humans in close proximity to them. What is perhaps surprising is that the incubation period for SARS averaged only 6.4 days and death in untreated patients followed relatively quickly, much faster than with most Covid cases. The only certainty is that more similar but still unknown viruses will appear.

What I do know is that greed knows no boundaries. If you think otherwise, you continue to fool yourself.