As the world grapples with the cost of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists warn that the funds needed to prevent the next zoonotic disease outbreak are scarce, leaving everyone vulnerable.
The estimated price to protect and monitor virgin forests and wildlife trade where disease occurs is approximately $ 22.2 billion to $ 30.7 billion, according to the report published in the journal Science.
While considerable, it pales compared to the $ 8.1 trillion minimum in losses globally as a result of the current pandemic, according to the report.
“Everyone has a vested interest in preventing it from happening again,” said Andrew Dobson, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University and lead author of the research.
New epidemics, like SARS, MERS and HIV, appear to emerge every four to five years, he said.
Investing in research that includes genetic virus libraries would accelerate the test response to vaccine development when new diseases emerge, he added.
And to catch the spread of the disease from animals to humans at the source, there must be a global push to reduce deforestation and restrict and monitor wildlife trade, as well as livestock.
“If you are concerned about security and protection, the cost of doing so is less than 2 percent of the military spending of the world’s top 10 militarized countries,” Dobson said.
There are examples where collaborative monitoring of health, wildlife and the environment has shown promise.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, deep in the forests of Central Africa, Ebola-infected gorilla and chimpanzee carcasses caused outbreaks among humans after hunters consumed the meat Unknowingly infected, according to Johannes Refisch, United Nations program manager. Great Apes Survival Association.
Refisch, who contributed to a similar UN report on pandemic prevention earlier this year, established programs to monitor the health of wildlife and people in Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, and other countries to detect the disease earlier. .
“If our monitoring system can detect the disease, hopefully we will have enough time to get some doctors and find an answer. This is important for the research, but it also gives local communities better protection,” he said.
But such programs are not penetrating enough to keep up with threats.
A new Ebola outbreak was declared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on June 1 by the World Health Organization, just a few weeks before a previous outbreak in another region of the country finally ended.
Rampant deforestation and wildlife trade are two main causes of disease spread.
As human populations invade natural environments, exposure to wildlife, including bats or rats, that transmit disease, increases, according to experts. But there are also other compound factors.
“It is not always that when we destroy a forest, a new disease arises,” Refisch said, adding that climate change and its effect on rain and temperature could be affecting how and when diseases emerge.
Wildlife markets and trade, in addition to domesticated animals, worldwide present high risks of disease spread, particularly in countries that do not have the resources to enforce industry regulations.
“It’s a horrible hygiene situation to pack live, dead, wild and domestic animals,” said Margaret Kinnaird of the World Wildlife Fund, who co-authored the report on Thursday.
Regional and international agencies already exist to regulate wildlife trade, but these groups are underfunded and lack the mandate and coordination to search for zoonotic diseases, according to the report.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which oversees wildlife trafficking, has an annual budget of $ 6 million.
At the regional level, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has only $ 30,000 allocated annually for monitoring wildlife trade, according to the report.
However, the scale of the industry far exceeds that, with the value of the illegal wildlife trade, reaching $ 23 billion in 2016, according to the World Bank.
Scientists are asking that wildlife monitoring agencies receive $ 500 million annually to prevent the next pandemic.
Funding in a similar range is also needed for the livestock industry where diseases such as swine and avian influenza are known to emerge worldwide.
But particularly for the poorest countries, governments tend to prioritize other sectors over disease control, said Bernard Bett, chief scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute.
“It is only when you have major pandemics like now that people are approaching, ‘Oh yes, we should be seeing these problems,'” he said.
Investments in prevention come with cost benefits beyond avoiding a pandemic. Protecting forest ecosystems offers $ 18.6 billion annually by reducing carbon emissions, according to Thursday’s report.
Maintaining biodiversity also prevents a species from being wiped out when diseases attack and improves other resources on which humans depend, such as soil and water.
“We need to control our really broken relationship with nature,” said Kinnaird.
