Part VI: Solutions to Zoonotic Diseases
To-Do Date: Mar 31 at 9:30amyou've learned what we are doing to make pandemics more likely. What can we do to make the LESS like?
1. Prevent Spillovers From Happening
Three of the contributors you've learned about contribute to the actual spillover events themselves: agricultural intensification, changes in land use (e.g., deforestation), losses in biodiversity. Below are some strategies and solutions from a study published in Science, “Ecology and Economics for Pandemic Prevention Links to an external site..”
Strategies
- Remove subsidies favoring deforestation, restrict private land clearing, support territorial rights of Indigenous people
- Strengthen and enforce the existing international conventions and increase funding for programs that monitor wildlife trade (The United States and China are responsible for 60 percent of global imports and exports of all wildlife)
- Ban national and international trade of high-risk species like primates, bats, pangolins, civets, and rodents
- Increase education, awareness on animal handling, sanitation, disease transmission and sustainable wildlife management and support for Indigenous people who rely on wildlife for food
Solutions
- Spend $500 million a year to expand and enhance wildlife-trade monitoring programs and technologies.
- Invest $217-279 million a year on early detection and control measures, including creating a library of virus genetics that could be used to pinpoint the source of a newly emerging pathogen early enough to slow or stop its spread.
- Invest over $19 billion a year on programs to end the wild meat trade in China and educate consumers and hunters about its potential risks.
- Invest up to $9.6 billion a year on programs and policies to reduce tropical deforestation by 50%.
- Spend up to $852 million a year to reduce viral spillovers, or inter-species transmissions, in livestock.
According to a study from 2020 Links to an external site., "we invest relatively little toward preventing deforestation and regulating wildlife trade, despite well-researched plans that demonstrate a high return on their investment in limiting zoonoses and conferring many other benefits. As public funding in response to COVID-19 continues to rise, our analysis suggests that the associated costs of these preventive efforts would be substantially less than the economic and mortality costs of responding to these pathogens once they have emerged." They conclude that preventing disease spillover from wildlife costs 100 times less than trying to respond to such a disease once it has spread.
In addition to solutions stemming from these four contribitors, we can also consider solutions that will enhance our ability to spot potential pandemic-causing viruses before they spillover, or if they do spillover, better contain transmission early.
2. Better Disease Surveillance & Early Warning Systems.
An effective surveillance and early warning system could allow for early detection of and rapid response to an outbreak before it spreads. In order to spot and possibly help prevent disease spillover our outbreak must do each of the following:
- identify virus reservoirs and sequence viruses isolated from those reservoirs to help inform surveillance strategies for viruses that could spillover and cause harm to human health
- include participatory surveillance of unusual events. For example, communities and field agents to detect the first spillover cases and act quickly to contain them.
- surveillance of the wild and domestic animal supply chain at all times and not just after diseases become epidemics or pandemics.
3. Strengthening Public Health Systems
Effectiveness at containing early transmission varied around the world. While this may be in part due to differences in transmissibility of different variants of the virus, it was also influenced by the public health systems within different countries. Countries that took action early, executed a coordinated and science-based strategy centered around testing and contract tracint and providing trustworthy and transparent information to the public were more effective at containing early spread.
The Role of the United States
Preventing a future pandemic will require immense global cooperation. Because we live in a globally-connected world, what happens in a cave in Thailand or a jungle in Africa can have impacts around the world, including in the United States. The United States Federal Government scaled back many programs meant to help identify and prevent outbreaks of disease in recent years.
For example, the U.S. pulled funding from project Links to an external site. a run by a U.S. nonprofit that sends teams to China to trap bats and check their blood, saliva and feces for new coronaviruses with the goal of identifying locations that need to be monitored, strategize how to prevent spillover of those virus into humans, and get a head start on creating vaccines and treatments to those viruses. The project has identified hundreds of coronaviruses, including one very similar to the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic. This program was funded in 2015, but funding was eliminated in April 2020.
In July 2020, the United States Federal Government under President Trump made the decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization Links to an external site., which is at the forefront of the global response to the pandemic. President Biden has since reversed this decision.
In order to effectively identify and suppress outbreaks of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19, it is in the best interest of the United States to invest in global efforts to sample wildlife that are potential hosts of zoonotic viruses and work with global partners to develop strategies to prevent spillovers and develop preventative and therapeutic treatments.
Optional Resources:
The keys to preventing future pandemics Links to an external site.
Great visual representation of what we have discussed Links to an external site.