Marc Valitutto and his team collecting a blood sample from an Indian flying fox (bat) at a high-risk site where bats roost over pigs, chickens, and people. PPE was required to be worn to minimize the opportunity for potential disease transmission to the field team.
Courtesy of Marc ValituttoI’m a wildlife veterinarian who lived in Myanmar on and off for the past five years hunting for viruses that could cause a global pandemic.
Wearing full-body protective gear in 100-degree heat, my team and I entered pitch-black caves and clambered down slippery ravines piled high with bat guano. Our job was to look for pathogens in bat populations that might trigger the next pandemic. We identified a total of six novel coronaviruses before the one that causes Covid-19 swept the globe, infecting over 60 million people and claiming more than 1.4 million lives to date.
Our findings and reports back to communities and government officials helped people understand the wildlife source of the virus and high-risk activities. To date, in a country of 53 million people, there have been just under 100,000 cases and 2,000 deaths—a death rate more than 20 times lower than the U.S.
These activities were funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Predict program. Its detection protocols were also used to identify the first infected patients who traveled outside of China following the Covid-19 outbreak. That wouldn’t have been possible without the program’s work providing equipment to regional labs and training field teams and lab scientists. Earlier this year, the Trump administration let the $200 million funding expire as part of extensive budget cuts imposed on USAID that forced a halt in work and hundreds of layoffs.
Researchers and governments are still preparing for the next major outbreak. Another devastating global crisis isn’t inevitable because a preventive framework already exists for fighting novel pathogens likely to jump from animals to humans. What’s missing is an internationally coordinated approach to put this into action.
The risks of even bigger pandemics are real and growing. Researchers estimate there are nearly 1.7 million viruses that remain undetected in animals, as many as 850,000 of which have the potential to infect people. About 75% of emerging infectious diseases that threaten humans are thought to originate among wildlife. But like other zoonotic diseases, Covid-19 is a health problem linked to a development one. As population growth pushes more people into previously remote areas, humans are coming into increasing contact with animals that can carry disease.
Countries will need to work together to improve environmental management, better regulate changes in land use, and protect biodiversity to minimize opportunities for viruses to jump from animals to people. A global effort to evaluate wild animal species and limit high-risk human behaviors can dramatically reduce these risk factors.
Worldwide coordination will be needed to stop another pandemic caused by an infection that jumps from animals to humans. Nations can implement programs based on existing regional or global cooperative agreements, but that will require global public-health standards with long-term international monetary support. Existing international bodies like the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the Global Fund could step in to centralize the needed response. Otherwise, a new independent council will need to help implement a consistent, locally tailored prevention and response framework around the world.
Absent this approach, governments need to commit to allowing international inspection teams to enforce worldwide land-use protocols within their borders. This would allow countries to subscribe to a service that has a direct impact on their citizens, their broader regions, and the global population, while letting national governments drive considerable decision-making within their borders. International inspection teams specialized in evaluating high-risk locations like wet markets and behaviors including extracting bat guano for fertilizer would be deployed to assess national policies, infrastructure, law-enforcement practices, and cultural norms. The goal would be to hold each country accountable for taking appropriate measures to protect the world’s health. If countries fail to sufficiently prioritize pandemic preparedness under such a model they could be sanctioned, as well as having travel restrictions placed on their citizens.
An effective approach will also need to include regulation of land use, a key factor influencing the spread of viruses. Recent years have seen rampant development for agriculture, logging, road construction, commercial growth, ecotourism, and other uses. That has created particularly dangerous public-health conditions across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America—tropical and subtropical regions where governments frequently don’t have the political power or resources to take sufficient regulatory measures on their own.
While the financial commitment to implement these solutions is high, it outweighs the costs of more pandemics. In direct response to the Covid-19 outbreak, the federal government has revived the Predict program under a new name, Strategies to Prevent Spillover, with initial funding of $100 million over five years. Another similar USAID initiative called One Health Workforce Next Generation, with $85 million committed over five years, focuses more on labor-force capacity building.
Collectively, $37 million a year for the next half-decade is a laudable investment, but far from the nearly $4 billion USAID officials estimate is needed for comprehensive wildlife biosurveillance that would create near-complete detection of the world’s viruses. In addition, a recent intergovernmental report suggests it would cost roughly $40 billion to 58 billion annually to implement pandemic-prevention measures worldwide.
The Covid-19 pandemic is set to cost Americans alone $16 trillion, almost 26 times the cost of a global system.
The next disease, the next outbreak, the next pandemic—none are inevitable. Preventing another Covid-19 will mean replicating community-focused approaches at a global scale while understanding disease-transmission risks at the local level. Tackling these risks requires a profound respect for cultural and governmental realities on the ground. As my work in Myanmar has shown, individuals will take steps to protect one another when they hear a clear and consistent message on public health. Returning home to the U.S., I’m reminded how that behavior breaks down when there isn’t consistent public policy.
We know we can stop the next pandemic, and we also know how to do it. The only thing that’s truly inevitable is what will happen if we don’t.
Dr. Marc Valitutto is the senior field veterinarian for EcoHealth Alliance, where he focuses on pandemic preparedness in Southeast Asia and China. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of EcoHealth Alliance.
"virus" - Google News
December 03, 2020 at 08:00PM
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The Next Killer Virus Is Out There. Only Global Cooperation Can Stop It. - Barron's
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