The risk to human health from diseases that leap the species barrier from animals, whether wild or domesticated, to sicken or even kill humans has been tragically demonstrated by the continuing global pandemic of COVID-19, a novel and deadly variant of the coronavirus that emerged in China late in 2019 and has now reportedly killed more than five million people around the world over the last two years, more than 750,000 of those fatalities here in the United States.
Both coronaviruses and influenza are known as zoonotic diseases, which are infectious diseases that are transmitted between species from animals to humans (or from humans to animals). COVID-19 (or formally, SARS-COV2) is believed to have emerged from the wild bat population in the Wuhan province of China, although the U.S. intelligence community has determined that there is insufficient evidence to divine if the original transmission (case zero) occurred under natural conditions or happened as a result of an accidental laboratory release from a facility also located in that area. The swine flu epidemic of 2009 from the H1N1 variant, which is believed to have killed between 250,000 and 500,000 people globally in 2009 and 2010, reportedly emerged from hog farms in central Mexico. In its 2020/21 programmatic budget, the World Health Organization (WHO) asserted that 75 percent of today’s emerging pathogens are zoonotic in origin.
In recent years, there have also been serious outbreaks of animal diseases such as African Swine Fever (ASF) and avian flu that have adversely affected animal agriculture around the world. As described in my blog posted in March 2019 (https://www.agweb.com/opinion/spread-african-swine-fever-raises-global-concerns), the disease first appeared in China in August of 2018, and has since spread to commercial hog facilities, backyard hog operations, and feral populations throughout Asia in 2019 and 2020 and to Western Europe and the Caribbean region in 2021. In the late summer of 2021, ASF cases emerged on the island of Hispaniola, both in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which are located less than one thousand miles from the continental United States. Even though ASF does not directly impact human health, a 2020 study estimated that an outbreak of ASF in the United States would cost the economy up to $50 billion over ten years, mainly from lost pork export markets.
Over the past few months, there have been reported outbreaks of highly transmissible avian flu in China and Japan, as well as several countries in Europe, including the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, requiring the depopulation of hundreds of thousands of birds in commercial flocks so far. The flu strains detected were not the same in the European outbreaks as in Asia, categorized as H5N1 in Europe and H5N6 in Asia. Already this year, China has reported 21 deaths from human cases of avian flu, so animal to human transmission is already occurring at a low level.
A global animal disease surveillance system is already in place, the Global Early Warning System (GLEWS) for Health Threats and Emerging Risks at the Human-Animal Ecosystem Interface. GLEWS was established in 2006 as a joint project of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).
As laid out on their website, the stated objectives of GLEWS are as follows:
1. improve detection of health threats and events of potential concern at the human animal-ecosystems interface;
2. undertake joint risk assessments to inform rapid action on all acute health events of potential international concern at the human-animal-ecosystems interface, that would benefit from the organizations working together;
3. monitor disease events to assist prediction of changes in endemic or seasonal diseases and associated drivers to inform prevention and preparedness activities for health events at the human–animal–ecosystems interface;
4. ensure timely, coordinated and relevant risk communication about high-impact health events of potential concern at the human-animal-ecosystems interface:
within and between the three organizations,
contribute to tripartite or organizational risk communication with Member countries, the public and the international community as necessary.
Because GLEWS is a joint effort by the three multilateral organizations mentioned above, none of the organizations’ publicly available financial reports provide line item information on funding levels for this program. The WHO’s program budget for 2020/21 did identify a need to “develop a tripartite guide and operational tool for addressing zoonotic diseases through a One Health approach”.
In 2014, USAID awarded $122 million to the FAO to undertake a five-year project to evaluate emerging pandemic threats, as phase 2 of an ongoing USAID effort called Emerging Pandemic Threat or EPT2. The work involved assessing FAO’s activities in 36 countries that related to avian influenza, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), the African Sustainable Livestock 2050 project, and stockpiling of specialist resources needed to detect and contain disease outbreaks, and building those countries’ capacities to address these issues. This project was in its last year of funding when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, and the widespread misery it continues to wreak globally underscores the importance of one of the final report’s recommendations, to strengthen the sustainability of national systems to prepare for pandemics, especially at the individual and organizational level.
Even with the approval of several vaccines that help to protect people against COVID-19, the emergence of new, more infectious strains such as the Delta variant, resistance to getting vaccinated and undertaking other public health responses due to ideological reasons, and limited access to the vaccine in most developing countries, several thousand people are still dying from the disease every day.
While we still find ourselves in the grip of the worst global pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, we need to recognize that we cannot predict when the next pandemic-capable pathogen might emerge. The U.S. government and governments of other developed countries should invest more resources in both the GLEWS program and capacity-building effort similar to that undertaken in EPT2 described above.
