PANDEMICS & ONE HEALTH
FOR THE vast majority of people on Earth today, the past year or so has been unprecedented. It has been over 100 years since the world has experienced a pandemic disease such as COVID-19 – highly contagious, debilitating and deadly. The last time was the 1918 influenza pandemic, which raged for over two years.
Back then, many of the preventative measures we’ve had to deal with today were implemented. They received the same blowback from exhausted populations around the world. But, for that pandemic to end, for ‘herd immunity’ to be achieved, an estimated 50 million to 100 million people had to die. Back then, the cause of influenza, an orthomyxovirus, was not understood. Researchers tried to develop vaccines using bacteria, but these, naturally, were ineffective.
Fast-forward 100 years, and today we understand so much more. When COVID-19 emerged in late 2019, its coronavirus causative agent was quickly identified, categorised and named – SARS-CoV-2. Rapid vaccine development was possible so that within a year, a number of effective products were available to speed up herd immunity and save lives.
How has this been achieved? One Health! Wildlife biologists, veterinarians, infectious disease specialists and other scientists have collaborated to identify and sample wildlife species, such as bats, pangolins and other animals that carry coronaviruses, and created a database which allowed identification of the close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in those species, indicating the likely source.
Amazing new vaccine technologies, long under development and used successfully in animals as far back as the early 2000s, were brought into play. Existing vaccine research on the first SARS coronavirus from 2003 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus from 2013, never used since those diseases were controlled, made it far easier to work with the novel virus. The pandemic enabled clinical trials to proceed rapidly to test vaccine safety and effectiveness.
As our human population grows, encroaching on wildlife habitats, harvesting wildlife for food or other purposes, we increase our risk of a ‘spillover’ of new zoonotic infections. We also risk diseases spilling over into our domestic animals and pets, with devastating effects on our lives and livelihoods. Environmental professionals, collaborating with human and animal health professionals, can help governments to make informed decisions.
Using One Health to guide how we interact with our environment and identify the diseases that are out there in nature, and the risk they pose to us and the animals around us, we can better manage potential pandemics in the future. It can be utilised in the creation of more resilient communities to face the effects of climate change and natural disasters. One Health is a vital component of the quest to achieve our sustainable development goals.