Experts Discuss How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. Since the virus was initially detected in Wuhan, China, last year, over 60 million people have been infected and over 1.4 million have died. While the human toll is the key concern, the International Monetary Fund estimates that COVID-19 could also cost $35 trillion in lost economic output worldwide.

Little is currently known about how COVID-19 began infecting humans, although it is widely accepted that the disease originated in the wild. On October 20, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) convened public health and wildlife experts to discuss the current state of science on COVID-19 emergence and the danger the wildlife trade presents to human populations.

Dr. Jonathan Epstein, Vice President of Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance, noted that while the earliest known cases of COVID-19 had no direct link to wildlife, the first known cluster of cases occurred near a seafood and wildlife market in Wuhan, and the closest known relative of the virus has been found in horseshoe bats.

Horseshoe bats were the source of the 2002 SARS coronavirus outbreak, and are likely the source of the COVID-19 outbreak. These bats are still hunted and consumed in rural areas of China, although, Epstein observed, it remains to be seen whether the virus jumped directly to humans from bats or via an intermediary, such as livestock.

Close contact with wild areas contributes to the spread of novel diseases in human populations, as such contact makes it easier for zoonotic viruses—or viruses that originate in animals—to jump to humans or to domesticated animals and then to humans. This is why, according to Epstein, limiting industrial or agricultural development in wild places is key to preventing the next pandemic.

“Ecosystem integrity is essential to limiting our risk for spillovers and outbreaks and pandemics, because if we keep our ecosystems intact, the reservoirs that live within them, that are carrying pathogens, will stay there,” Epstein said. “Viruses that are circulating—whether it's in bats or rodents or primates or other wildlife—will remain in the communities of animals that they have evolved in.”

While conservation should be seen as a matter of public health, efforts to preserve natural spaces have become more difficult due to fallout from COVID-19-related economic contractions. Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, commented that not only are governments in developing economies worldwide facing restricted budgets for law enforcement and anti-poaching activities, but those governments will also feel more pressure to increase extractive and agricultural industries to make up for lost income.

Several solutions were proposed for improving conservation efforts in the name of public health. Epstein and Felbab-Brown discussed the possibility of pricing biodiversity into economic decisions, similarly to current REDD+ mechanisms for pricing carbon. The risk of an economic shutdown due to a public health crisis such as COVID-19 should be priced into the cost of developing in ecologically sensitive areas. By placing a higher value on intact ecosystems, multinational, public, and small-scale landowners could be disincentivized from developing those lands.

Conservation decisions can be made easier with scientific analyses identifying areas with the highest risk for novel disease encounters, which often correspond to areas with higher biodiversity. By delineating these critical spaces, along with areas of lower risk, stakeholders can meet extractive needs while keeping the local—or global—community safe. EcoHealth Alliance released such a database in 2017.

Alongside industrial and agricultural development, the wildlife trade is one of the biggest areas of intersection between humans and areas of high biodiversity. Felbab-Brown, who wrote a book about the wildlife trade, commented that blanket bans on animal products present significant problems in enforcement and overall efficacy, and noted that policymakers should instead focus on reducing the demand for wildlife and illegal agricultural uses.

Bans on commercial wildlife markets with unhygienic conditions, however, are easier to implement and monitor and can be effective in reducing transfer of zoonotic diseases to humans. Such bans could also reduce demand for wild products by limiting their availability.

“[Some commercial wildlife markets] mix many species together in catastrophically unhygienic and outright cruel conditions, with hundreds of specimens of birds or reptiles packed together in one cage, another cage on top of that packed with another taxa of animals—all exposed to sun, with poor food, poor water conditions, often animals dying right inside the cages rotting there… just enormous incubators for viral spillovers,” Felbab-Brown said. “Those markets should not exist.”

Bans and conservation decisions should be made with stakeholder engagement representing the wide variety of communities and institutions involved in the management and use of natural resources in a given area. Panelists emphasized that it is important to harmonize cultural, economic, and conservation needs. This will require some aspects of the wildlife trade to stay, while stakeholders are educated on the most unsafe and economically- and environmentally-harmful practices that should be altered or ended.

Ultimately, emphasizing the link between public health and conservation could lead to better outcomes for both. The COVID-19 pandemic could be a motivating force to limit the development of wild areas. As Felbab-Brown noted, there “is an enormous opportunity in the immense tragedy and devastation of COVID of again highlighting how our health is linked to the good health of biodiversity of the planet.”

Author: Amber Todoroff