Can we stop the next pandemic by seeking out deadly viruses in the wild?
The dubious track record — and potential risks — of virus hunting, explained.
In 2009, USAID, the US government agency responsible for international development, initiated Predict, a groundbreaking project for its time.
The $200 million program was tasked with building other countries’ capabilities to detect new viruses and manage outbreaks, studying the human-wildlife interface and learning about how viruses cross over into humans. Its headline work was viral discovery: directly finding novel viruses in wildlife that posed a risk of a pandemic before they spilled over, and ideally, prevent it from happening.
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Critics — including researchers who study biosecurity and biosafety — argue it doesn’t really pass a cost-benefit analysis. In some ways, virus hunting is looking for a needle in a haystack — the handful of viruses that might cross over to humans amid tens of thousands that won’t — when we don’t even know how to tell needles from hay, or what to do with a needle once we identify one.
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Monitoring the interface between humans and animals for pandemic prevention has value, particularly when the programs are narrowly targeted at certain objectives: say, a focus on reducing spillover, or surveillance of potential animal infections, or studying viruses that have already spilled over into humans. Research published last month in Nature projects that global warming could drive 4,000 viruses to spread for the first time between mammals, including potentially humans and animals, by 2070, underscoring the changing threat from zoonotic spillovers.
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There is no question that lots more preparedness work is needed to prevent the next pandemic. It’s just a matter of what work is best — and safest. “Ultimately, what makes one spillover event into a pandemic versus an isolated outbreak has a lot more to do with policies and health systems (i.e., community awareness, surveillance systems, rapid response capabilities) than it does about knowing ahead of time what sort of characteristics the virus has,” Georgetown biologist Claire Standley, one of the authors of the paper looking at surveillance programs, told me.
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