Résumé
Associating health issues with objectives for preserving biodiversity no longer seems incongruous. For example, recent work in Cambodia has shown that the health of rural populations is positively associated with forest preservation (Pienkowski et al., 2017). Thus, the conservation of biodiversity is not only a concern of citizens from rich countries but it proves its interest in the health of the poorest in one of the least economically developed countries of Southeast Asia. However, the link between biodiversity and health is no less complex. It poses challenges for understanding the interactions of societies with their ecological environment. This link also presents new governance challenges in the face of global planetary changes (climate change, deforestation, agriculture intensification and industrialization, urbanization) leading to both health sanitary crises and biodiversity crises. Is Southeast Asia special in relation to these health crises? Some of the most important infectious diseases of the past 20 years have emerged in Southeast Asia, or South China. Thus, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in southern China causing 8,000 human cases and nearly 800 deaths in thirty-seven countries at the beginning of 2003 (McLean et al.,2005). Epidemiological studies have characterized the virus (a coronavirus), its origin (from bats), and the probable mechanism of transmission to humans. Civets, small carnivores previously contaminated by the virus harbored by bats, sold in "bushmeat" markets in southern China, have consequently infected buyers, then a doctor who, in turn, infected customers of a hotel frequented by an international clientele in Hong Kong favoring the spread of the virus through international air traffic. An infectious agent harbored by Asian bats has therefore been able to spread into 37 countries (Cabasset et al., 2021).