
Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics
The world witnessed the severe humanitarian and economic repercussions of pandemic pathogens during COVID-19 crisis, and we remain dangerously unprepared for future pandemics.
With the rate of zoonotic pathogen spread increasing and rapid technological advances in synthetic biology and AI, there exists the possibility of far deadlier pandemics, but also new opportunities to defend against them.
This podcast is from the Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics course, which covers technical and policy efforts to prevent, detect and respond to catastrophic pandemics.
Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics
We Aren't Prepared for the Next Pandemic
It will probably start with a cluster of unusual symptoms. Some of the people with the disease will know each other, but won’t have been exposed to animals, suggesting the infection can spread between people. Then more cases will start appearing in other areas, maybe even in other countries.
The next pandemic could take many forms, but a respiratory infection remains high on the list of probabilities. It could be a new flu virus, or a new coronavirus, or perhaps something else. It might emerge from a market, or a mink farm, or from another source. It may be years away, or months away – or it could be spreading now, yet to be detected.
People often talk about ‘pandemic preparedness’, but increasingly I think this is an unhelpful term. Only in hindsight can we sort events into ‘pandemics’ or ‘outbreaks’ or ‘isolated cases’. In real-time, all these paths begin with a cluster of infections. So if we want to curb pandemics, we need to think about what the response to a small new outbreak will look like.
Original text:
https://kucharski.substack.com/p/we-arent-prepared-for-the-next-pandemic
Author(s):
Adam Kucharski