“Smart surveillance” for viral spillover from animals to humans, targeted preparedness and drug and vaccine research, and worldwide cooperation on surveillance and stopping disease spread are required to scale back deaths and lessen the economic consequences of the subsequent pandemic, in response to a world team of scientists.

In a perspective article published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the 14 experts cite virus pandemics dating from 1918 to the COVID-19 crisis as examples of how “the world has largely failed to satisfy the challenge to be higher prepared to stop or reply to the subsequent outbreak.”

Future outbreaks are inevitable. The team says the very best strategy to lower possibilities for widespread disease outbreaks and pandemics and improve prospects for mounting a rapid response is to adopt a One Health approach to diminish these threats – working across disciplines and administrative barriers in any respect levels to grasp and address links between animal and human health and the environment.

Ohio State University virologist and immunologist Linda Saif, co-lead creator of the paper, has been sounding the alarm about viruses that affect food animals, wildlife and humans for a long time – and provided expertise very early within the pandemic in regards to the dangers of SARS-CoV-2. In 1995, her lab was the primary to document a coronavirus’s leap from wild animals to cattle and from cattle to poultry. The popularity of interspecies transmission of coronaviruses from deer to cattle was prescient: In 2021, Saif was a part of an Ohio State research team that showed that SARS-CoV-2 could spill over to deer. All these years later, the scientific community continues to be learning about how the wily pathogens work.

“SARS-CoV-2 taught us that viruses don’t respect borders, partitions, demographics or politics – nor do they respect species barriers,” said Saif, a Distinguished University Professor in Ohio State’s Center for Food Animal Health with faculty appointments within the departments of animal sciences and veterinary preventive medicine.

“Emerging and re-emerging RNA viruses – including coronaviruses – are a serious reason for the transmission of disease from animals to humans and back again to animals, and that spillover between species enables viruses to ascertain latest hosts through which they will mutate and persist. Probably the most effective strategy to fight back is to work as a worldwide community and apply One Health practices for prevention and preparedness.”

The researchers from the US, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe convened in 2021 because the Independent Task Force on COVID-19 and Other Pandemics: Origins, Prevention and Response. The duty force was chaired by Gerald Keusch of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory and Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University, who’s co-lead creator of the PNAS article.

Recommendations are based on their findings from an expansive review of major RNA virus outbreaks during the last 50 years and research results before and through the COVID-19 pandemic. They paid particular attention to identifying places and times when targeted interventions previously could have blocked cross-species transmission to tell their proposed solutions for the longer term.

Evidence strongly suggests that the 2 SARS coronavirus outbreaks, in 2003 and 2019, may be traced to coronaviruses in bats that almost certainly spilled over to intermediate animal hosts in wildlife farms or markets before infecting people – within the case of COVID-19, on the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. The duty force found the danger for a pandemic increases when people and animals interact closely in altered settings driven by land use and climate change, environmental degradation, the wildlife trade, population growth and economic pressure.

Addressing the danger aspects of a lot of these conditions is one focus of the group’s recommendations, which include:

• Conducting early-warning surveillance in locations where people, wildlife and domestic animals intermingle to detect high-threat potential zoonotic pathogens and inform development of potential broad spectrum vaccines and therapeutics.
• Investing in research and development of diagnostics, antivirals and vaccines for priority pathogens, and streamlining avenues to enable rapid clinical testing and manufacturing of medical countermeasures.
• Reducing drivers for spillover risk and spread, partly by minimizing high-risk human-wildlife contact, on the front lines of disease emergence from the community to country level.
• Countering misinformation and disinformation in regards to the prevention and control of emerging diseases based on research focused on fostering public trust in and understanding of science and expert advice, and providing trusted resources and outlets for accurate information.
• Establishing an inclusive, transparent One Health governance framework in any respect levels for pandemic preparedness and response, and providing stable funding for all related global efforts.

“It is not an overstatement to say that this requires worldwide collaboration and coordination to give you measures enabling us to predict, prevent, mitigate and control future pandemics,” Saif said. “We all know where opportunities have been missed previously. We all know what research questions should be answered most urgently. We just must seize the chance and have the resolve to act on what we all know to enhance human, animal and our ecosystem health.”

This look toward a greater future comes at a time when SARS-CoV-2 continues to be causing infections worldwide and still has potential to flow into as viral variants that may pose latest threats to human health and, as spillovers proceed, potentially to animal health, the researchers noted.

“The time to energise these processes is now,” the duty force concludes, “when the tragedy of COVID-19 continues to confront the general public and politicians.”

Source:

Journal reference:

Keusch, G.T., et al. (2022) Pandemic origins and a One Health approach to preparedness and prevention: Solutions based on SARS-CoV-2 and other RNA viruses. PNAS. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2202871119.