Harvard group urges governments to focus on preventing pandemics, not responding to them
An expert group convened by the USA’s Harvard University has urged governments to focus on preventing the creation of new viruses, noting that preventive work is vastly cheaper than responding to new diseases once an outbreak has occurred.
Government discussions on the issue have focussed on investments in outbreak control, such as diagnostic tests, drugs and vaccines. These are critical but inadequate to the scale of the risk, the scientists from the US, Latin America, Africa and South Asia said in a new report.
The group of scientists, known as the International Scientific Task Force to Prevent Pandemics at the Source, want governments to take action to curtail human activities that can lead to diseases jumping from humans to animals. The COVID-19 pandemic – originating in a virus hosted by bats – has added to the long list of such diseases, which includes AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS and Zika.
Closing Pandora’s box
There are an estimated 1.7 million undiscovered viruses in wildlife, and many of these could infect humans as people encroach ever further into untouched wild areas in search of timber, farmland, and wild animals for food or trade.
In a report launched this week, the task force said that work to strengthen healthcare systems should be integrated with environmental conservation in an approach known as One Health. The report cites an example in Borneo, in which people living near a national park in Borneo received discounts on health treatment to discourage them from illegal logging.
The task force also recommended that governments should invest in research to identify which interventions – including those focused on forest conservation, wildlife hunting and trade, and biosecurity around farms – are most effective at preventing ‘spillover’.
Recommended actions
Understanding of the most likely locations for pathogen emergence also needs to improve, it said, together with assessments of drivers such as travel and population density. Government investment should be targeted at conserving tropical forests, particularly those that are relatively intact; improving biosecurity for livestock and farmed wild animals, especially when it takes place near large human populations; and creating an intergovernmental partnership to address spillover risk from wild animals to livestock and people, involving United Nations food, agricultural and environmental specialists and the World Health Organization.
“To manage COVID-19, we have already spent more than [US]$6 trillion dollars on what may turn out to be the most expensive band aids ever bought, and no matter how much we spend on vaccines, they can never fully inoculate us from future pandemics,” said task force leader Dr Aaron Bernstein. Actions that prevent disease spillover would also help prevent climate change, he added.
The task force’s policy recommendations will be presented to the G20 summit in October and the UN Climate Change talks (COP26) in November.
About Catherine Early
Catherine is a journalist and editor specialising in government policy and regulation. She writes predominantly about environmental issues and has held permanent roles at the Environmentalist (now known as Transform), the ENDS Report, Planning magazine and Windpower Monthly, and has also written for the Guardian, the Ecologist and China Dialogue. She was a finalist in the Guardian’s International Development Journalism competition 2009, and was part of the team that won PPA Business Magazine of the Year 2011 for Windpower Monthly. She also won an outstanding content award at Haymarket Media Group’s employee awards for data-led stories in Planning magazine. She holds a 2:1 honours degree in English language and literature from Birmingham University.
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