The EconomistJune 27th 2020 Science & technology 672 dredth of the price it was in the early days of
predict. But, as with the coronavirus work
in China, it would also be advisable to keep
an eye on the people doing the mixing with
the animals, to look for viral chatter.
Dr Farrar’s Vizions project ran in Viet-
nam from 2011 to 2017, with sampling teams
regularly visiting farms, markets and abat-
toirs across the country and taking blood
samples from people living and working
there. They also took blood and faecal sam-
ples from animals in the vicinity, such as
pigs, chickens, cats, dogs, bats, civets and
rats. An important aim of the project was to
set up local capacity to catalogue the diver-
sity of viruses in these animals, some of
which might become threats to human and
animal health in future.
Vizions was only a pilot study, however.
In light of covid-19 Dr Farrar proposes beef-
ing up the human side of the surveillance
effort by creating a Global Immunological
Observatory that would monitor blood
banks and discarded blood samples taken
originally for clinical purposes for evi-
dence of new viruses, as well as collecting
blood samples specifically for this purpose
from people in emerging-disease hotspots
(see map on a previous page). This would
reveal not only what was there, but also
how immune responses formed in re-
sponse to the possible new threats.
It would, though, be both morally iniq-
uitous and politically naive to run such a
system mainly in order to protect rich peo-
ple in far-away lands from an eventual pan-
demic. Any scaled-up versions of these
surveillance projects will need local sup-
port in order to work, says Dr Mazet. That
means generating information which is
useful where it is being collected, and
building up countries’ public-health ca-
pacities at the same time. Paying for the
new capacity could be linked to the fund-
ing of primary health care. Tests to monitor
antimicrobial resistance in known patho-
gens could be run on the same equipment.
The knowledge produced might, for ex-
ample, be used to direct public-health mes-
sages to the appropriate recipients. Dr Ma-
zet says that as people became aware of the
pathogens in their neighbourhoods they
could alter their behaviour accordingly.
Guano farmers, who collect bat droppings
to use as fertiliser, might improve their
personal protection—or move to another
line of work. People who hunt wild animals
could increase their hygiene standards
when butchering meat.As well as providing services for locals
and early warnings for public-health sys-
tems, such surveillance could be useful for
preparing countermeasures. Dr Daszak
does not just want the coronaviruses he
sees as a danger in South-East Asia to be
catalogued in a way that would make it easy
to pick out the one responsible in early
cases of a new disease. He also wants them
to be available in advance, for the develop-
ment of potential broad-spectrum antivi-
ral drugs and vaccines.
He cites the example of remdesivir, a
substance originally intended to treat
Ebola that recently became the first antivi-
ral drug approved by America’s Food and
Drug Administration for use against co-
vid-19. Researchers led by Ralph Baric, a vi-
rologist at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, have spent years testing a li-
brary of around 200,000 drugs to see
which, if any, would inhibit the novel coro-
naviruses collected and sequenced by Eco-
Health. His team identified remdesivir as a
promising candidate well before sars-
cov-2 emerged. Paying for research into
therapies for diseases that are not yet a pro-
blem may prove difficult. But mechanisms
might be invented.
“We’re not going to defeat the pandemic
era by waiting for vaccines,” says Dr Das-
zak. “We need to get ahead of the curve.” But
the politics and practicalities required to
create a monitoring network capable of
putting the world into that advantageous
position may be hard to crack.
Many governments are reflexively un-
willing to share data about their citizens
(and some citizens have their doubts, too).
They are often also protective of the poten-
tially lucrative genetic details of their na-
tive biodiversity. Local officials are con-
cerned about their power, and worry about
being shown up as incompetent by surveil-
lance. Zoonotic hotspots are, almost by de-
finition, a long way away from the infra-
structure that big biological-research
programmes depend on. And not all pub-
lic-health systems would be able to act on
the sort of early warning such a system
might provide.
But if there were ever a time when those
problems looked tractable, surely that time
is now. It is no coincidence that many of
the countries which have responded most
effectively to covid-19 are those that were
dealt the heaviest blows 18 years ago by
sars. Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and
Taiwan were all hit in this way. And though
South Korea, another effective responder,
got off lightly when sarswas around it saw
an outbreak of mers in 2015. People do
learn from experience. And now the world
has experienced a pandemic that has af-
fected almost everyone, whether they have
become infected or not, maybe it will think
more seriously about measures that could
smother the next one at birth. 7The animals have it
Prevalence of viruses, by speciesSource: EcoHealth AllianceNumberofknownviruses*R.sinicusis a probableoriginforSARS-CoV †Cats,dogs,bears,ottersandothersType of species Domestic Wild0 25 50 75 100Zoonotic viruses, %DogsCattleHorsesR. sinicus*0 20 40 60 80CattleDogsHorsesR.sinicus*
Domesticated
animals like cattle
and horses are more
studied than their
wild counterparts,
which is why more is
known of their
diseasesTree shrewsMarsupial omnivoresOdd-toed ungulatesEven-toed ungulatesMarsupial herbivoresElephantsHares, rabbits & pikasCarnivora†RodentsPrimatesBatsHedgehogs & molesOpossumsAnteaters & slothsArmadillos