How to avoid an era of pandemics

Any of 850 000 viruses could cause the next global crisis. Experts say we should focus on prevention

Future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, kill more people than Covid-19, and affect the global economy with more of a devastating impact than ever before.

This is the stark warning contained in a major new report on biodiversity and pandemics that calls for a transformative change in how the world deals with infectious diseases “to escape the era of pandemics”.

The 22 leading global experts behind the report, convened by the Intergovernmental SciencePolicy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes), in an urgent virtual workshop about the links between degradation of nature and increasing pandemic risks, say a “seismic shift” in the approach from reaction to prevention is needed.

The risk of pandemics is increasing rapidly, with more than five new diseases emerging in people every year, “any one of which has the potential to spread and become pandemic”.

There are an estimated 1.7-million “undiscovered” viruses thought to exist in mammal and avian hosts. Of these, 540 000 to 850 000 could have the ability to infect humans.

“Covid- 19 is at least the sixth global health pandemic since the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and although it has its origins in microbes carried by animals, like all pandemics, its emergence has been entirely driven by human activities,” says the report.

The causes are global environmental changes — the same factors that are responsible for biodiversity loss and climate change.

These include, among others, changes in land use, entailing deforestation, human settlement in primarily wildlife habitat, urbanisation, as well as the growth of crop and livestock production and agricultural expansion and intensification.

“These drivers of change bring wildlife, livestock, and people into closer contact, allowing animal microbes to move into people and lead to infections, sometimes outbreaks, and, more rarely, into true pandemics that spread through road networks, urban centres and global travel and trade routes.”

In a statement, Dr Peter Daszak, president of the Ecohealth Alliance and chair of the Ipbes workshop says there is no great mystery about the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic — or of any modern pandemic.

“The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment.”

Greater conservation of protected areas and measures that reduce unsustainable exploitation of high biodiversity regions will reduce wildlife-livestock-human contact and help prevent the spillover of new diseases, according to the report.

“Given the timing, this is an extremely important report that will hopefully land with some impact with policymakers,” says Christopher Trisos, senior researcher, at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town.

“The Covid- 19 pandemic illustrates the massive importance of having a healthy climate, a healthy environment and healthy people and how those three things are intimately interlinked.”

This is a clear message for South Africa, Trisos says.

“It emphasises that nature-based approaches to sustainable development have massive co-benefits for health and livelihoods. For example, it’s showing that things like climate change adaptation in the water sector in South Africa is also health adaptation and pandemic preparedness. If people need to do things like wash their hands to stay safe then you need reliable water supply and with climate change projected to reduce rainfall in the south-west of the country, you need to be acting on climate change to be sure you’re prepared for pandemics.”

The approach to prevent pandemics, says the report, has effectively stagnated.

“We still rely on attempts to contain and control diseases after they emerge, through vaccines and therapeutics. However, Covid-19 demonstrates that this is a slow and uncertain path, and as the global population waits for vaccines to become available, the human costs are mounting, in lives lost, sickness endured, economic collapse, and lost livelihoods.”

James Irlam, the chairperson of the climate, energy and health special interest group at the Public Health Association of SA, says the report is “timely and powerful.

“These common causes suggest several shared solutions towards greater climate justice and health equity, which are especially important in South Africa as one of the most unequal and carbon-intensive economies in the world,” he says.

“The costs of reducing risks to prevent pandemics are estimated to be 100 times less than the cost of responding to such pandemics, which run into trillions of dollars, providing strong economic incentives for transformative change.”