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Tracey Goldstein is at the helm of Predict, the world’s most ambitious zoonosis program, investigating how viruses can jump between animals and humans. In the fall of 2019, she and her colleagues found a spectacular viral link between Sweden and the Pacific. But also worrying signs that Cambodia could become the breeding ground for an upcoming pandemic.
Traces of the seal death virus have been found in the Kattegatt, probably in 2002, in another species of animal: the sea otter. The problem was that the suffocated sea otters had died on the other side of the globe, on the Pacific coast of Alaska.
During the summer and fall of 2002 on the small island of Anholt in Kattegatt, on the outskirts of Falkenberg, thousands of dead seals are found on the beaches.
The seals were strangled to death from severe pneumonia as a result of a virus described as a puppy-like virus, or the Phocine Distemper, PDV, or Morbillivirus virus.
Viruses find new ways as ice melts
A similar phenomenon first occurred in 1988 and would also return in later years. Investigators are still doing extensive detective work to understand what the previously unknown form of seal death was due to.
The researchers began looking for the cause of the virus’s effects: like hunger migration from Greenland and environmental degradation and the Kattegat.
Few wondered how the virus would develop or continue.
– We coordinate all possible data on the movements of the seals, how far and how fast they could swim. We compare satellite images. It turned out that it coincided with melting ice in the Arctic, says Tracey Goldstein in a video of her isolation of covid-19 at her home on the west coast of the United States.
As the ice in the Arctic melted, it opened up new avenues for distribution and meetings between animal tribes that would never have known each other had it not been for the climate crisis. Mammals that had previously been unable to swim between the two seas were now able to mix with each other. The virus’s inherent ability to mutate and omit animal species did the rest.
Trump wanted to close the program
Today, Predict’s laboratory and research team are located in some 30 countries. For a long time, research was primarily concerned with extinguishing virus fires that had already started, or research on livestock and pets.
– But few saw the virus among wild animals, says Tracey Goldstein. The idea was to trace and develop knowledge about the virus before it was delayed.
The virus in the animal world remains a largely unexplored planet.
– We would need structures for this in every country on earth. You never know where the next virus outbreak will appear, she says.
The Predict program has cost the United States government $ 20 million a year for ten years to implement it. Last fall, it was warned that the program would be put on the shelf, or at least seriously curtailed. Many in the Trump administration thought it was too expensive. On March 20, 2020, Predict would end in its current form.
– Then came Covid-19 and everything turned upside down, says Tracey Goldstein. Saving $ 20 million for a chance to prevent mass death and trillion-dollar support packages no longer seemed like a good estimate.
Internationally, a project called the Global Virom Project was also launched that could coordinate a global network on the American model.
– Trump said he hoped we could forget the covid-19 crisis as soon as possible. I think that was the wrong answer. Rather, we have to learn from this, says Tracey Goldstein.
Drawing lessons
What happened with the current covid-19 pandemic was that a wild bat coronavirus jumped, or “spilled”, directly or indirectly (through livestock, for example) into humans. That is exactly what Predict is working on.
Could such “overspending” for man, for example, the death of the seal?
– I don’t think it’s a pathogen against humans. In humans, the equivalent is measles and we are vaccinated against it, she says.
So far at least. In recent years there have been cracks in the measles vaccination shield.
– People wonder if, if we don’t adequately protect ourselves against measles, would it open up to some new virus from the animal world? We don’t know today, says Tracey Goldstein.
– The lesson is that we should try to stop the melting of the ice. When the environment changes in this way, this type of phenomenon will occur more and more often, “she says.
Cambodia’s black gold could be the next ground zero
Even in cases where there is no so-called direct zoonosis, the transmission of a virus between animals and humans can have consequences. In the case of seal and oyster deaths of indigenous peoples in the Arctic, they live in part in search of infected animal species.
There are many other dangers on the border between the desert and man.
The fact that covid-19 originated from bats is not unexpected. Several species of bats can harbor a record number of different viruses without causing symptoms.
For the past five years, Tracey Goldstein and Predict’s network of experts have been closely watching what is happening in the Cambodian countryside. It is one of the possible virus cures that worries you the most.
Here are all the ingredients for another global pandemic.
In Cambodia, farmers discovered a new “black gold”: bat feces (or guano). Cambodia has a relatively small area of usable land for the region. Furthermore, it is under severe climatic pressure with stronger droughts and violent flooding. Chemical fertilizers have often dried the soil even more. It has also made mosquitoes increasingly resistant.
Faced with this, bat feces have proven to be an excellent and nutritious fertilizer for fruits, rice and grains.
Additionally, bats are able to eat their own weight on mosquitoes and insects, which can curb outbreaks of malaria and Zika virus. But not without other risks.
– We visited homes where farmers had bats hanging under rooftops, where animals leaned, children played, and women cooked, she says. The faeces are collected in sacks and shipped, sometimes for export. The palm trees have artificial branches to attract even more bats.
– This is an environment that makes our warning lights flash red. Here, a virus can spread very quickly and far across Asia, says Tracey Goldstein.
It is not possible to ban such activity, which, moreover, can give a poor farmer several hundred dollars in additional income.
– You should understand the whole context here and at least try to make sure that those who work with it protect themselves and that the guanon dries properly before it’s transmitted, says the virus expert.
Similar situations exist in the caves of Thailand. There, farmers in slippers and foppa shorts collect feces from bats. Virus experts don’t approach those places without a full suit-like snout.
The local staff rang the alarm bell.
The Nipah virus is a virus that bats can transmit to humans often with pigs as messengers. The Nipah virus kills with shortness of breath in 40-75 percent of cases. In Bangladesh, there have been almost yearly outbreaks of the virus.
– In Nepal, we could study how the Nipah virus passed from the flying dogs that hung from the trees where they drank the palm syrup and down with feces and urine to the pigs that barked under them, says the virus expert.
Direct intervention in nature also opens up the spread of viruses hitherto hidden from humans. When you clear forests to sell wood or plant soybean fields, it is not only short term for the climate.
– With the construction of roads in the primeval forest, not only people come into closer contact with wildlife. Construction workers need food and for me pigs, chickens and other animals. They are also at risk of coming into contact with new viruses, says Tracey Goldstein.
This does not mean that one should prohibit the construction of roads, which can also facilitate access to medical care and others to distant population groups.
But it is important that there is experience and knowledge of the risks among the local population. In short, a form of global tsunami warning network for virus issues. These are local on-site laboratories, information campaigns among the population that can take samples and send them for testing.
Tracey Goldstein himself has traveled to almost the thirty countries where Predict works preventively.
– It doesn’t help that I fly every time and that samples are sent around the earth for tests that can take several months. What we have done is train fantastic people on site, ”she says.
When Covid-19 was just beginning to spread from China to other Asian countries, staff at Predict’s laboratory in Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal were the first to test and sound the alarm.
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