<
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/03/26/1240779167/how-do-we-halt-the-next-pandemic-be-kind-to-critters-like-bats-says-a-new-paper>
'Almost every pandemic we've seen over the last century has come from a virus
that's spilled over into humans from an animal. "Generally, pandemics are seen
as a biomedical problem," says Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist
at Cornell University. "Certainly, once the pandemic is underway, it is a
biomedical problem because you need to have vaccines, you need therapeutics,
you need testing," she says.
"But the genesis of the pandemic is actually an ecological problem," says
Plowright. That is, it's due to the complex interactions between wildlife,
habitat, climate and people.
But there's been relatively little discussion about a spillover's ecological
origins and how to stop it from happening in the first place. Plowright found
only four publications on how the coronavirus circulates in natural bat
populations. That's compared to the tens of thousands of research articles
she's pulled up on the coronavirus spike protein, which has been the focus of
vaccines and efforts to understand how the virus enters and infects our cells.
Now, in a new perspective paper in
Nature Communications, Plowright and a
team of 24 ecologists, infectious disease scientists and policy experts have
distilled their collective observations into three recommendations to prevent
spillovers and halt epidemics and pandemics before they even start.
José Chies, an immuno-geneticist at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in
Brazil who wasn't involved in the research, says the paper demonstrates the
importance of proposing solutions based on the whole ecosystem at once. It's
something public health researchers call the One Health approach.
Human health is not something that should be considered in isolation, says
Chies. "You should consider animals, microorganisms and environment altogether.
It's ecology in a broad approach."'
Via Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
