Researchers call for worldwide biosurveillance network to protect from diseases

Decentralized approach more cost-effective and efficient than current systems

SAN DIEGO ZOO GLOBAL

 

The emergence of COVID-19 is a powerful reminder of how unchecked wildlife trade can lead to the spillover spread of viruses between wildlife and humans. Understanding that wholesale bans on trade can affect community livelihoods and food security, the pandemic underscores the need for widespread pathogen screening and monitoring to better understand, predict and contain outbreaks in wildlife and humans.

To date, global biosurveillance has consisted of centralized efforts led by governmental and specialized health agencies. A group of authors--including eight researchers from San Diego Zoo Global--writing in the journal Science this week offer an efficient approach that may be more resilient to fluctuations in government support and could be utilized even in remote areas.

Given the importance for the health of a global population, the team of scientists recommend a "decentralized" disease surveillance system, enabled by modern pathogen-detection methods, which builds in-country capacity for addressing challenges. Utilizing portable molecular screening that is both cost-effective and relatively easy to use, this network would take a more fundamentally proactive approach to wildlife screening, they write.

"The COVID-19 crisis has shown that the international wildlife trade is a global system in need of greater oversight," said Elizabeth Oneita Davis, Ph.D., conservation social scientist in Community Engagement at San Diego Zoo Global, who was one of the authors. "However, ill-conceived measures such as 'blanket bans' could affect millions of people and drive these activities deeper underground, further impeding our efforts to understand and reduce demand for wildlife."

The network should expand monitoring beyond human disease outbreaks to encompass a broader understanding of pathogens and evaluate their spillover risk (of spreading from wildlife to humans or vice versa), they write. To this end, surveillance focal points should include wildlife markets and farms, as well as free-ranging populations of "high-risk" wildlife.

"Since the H1N1 outbreak of 2009, which spurred governmental responses such as PREDICT to begin active virus hunting in zoonotic hotspots, genomic technologies have transformed radically," said Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa, Ph.D., lead author and conservation geneticist on San Diego Zoo Global's Population Sustainability team. "Sequencing the genome of a virus is now feasible on miniature sequencers, directly at the point of sample collection. Today, we can more directly and powerfully survey wildlife health, identify areas of high spillover potential and contribute to minimizing those behaviors, to keep human and wildlife populations safe," she said.

Key to this approach is the creation of a pathogen database to provide early warnings of spillover potential, and assist in containment and development of therapeutic treatments.

"A decentralized approach to biosurveillance would more readily address wildlife and ecosystem health, and therefore conservation as a whole," said Steven V. Kubiski, DVM, Ph.D., a veterinary pathologist on San Diego Zoo Global's Disease Investigations team, who co-authored the perspective piece. "The ability to test multiple populations is just the beginning--a centralized location for deposition, analysis and reporting would add even more value, and could serve as an open-access resource."

The authors note that beyond endangering human health, emerging infectious diseases can imperil wildlife populations that have not evolved resistance to unfamiliar pathogens.

Additionally, the authors call for an internationally recognized standard for wildlife trade, the risks of which they call the "largest unmet challenge" for infectious disease surveillance. Despite the known risks, little monitoring takes place in wildlife markets like the one believed to be the original vector of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

"Decentralized pathogen screening in wildlife lends itself not only to early detection of pathogen spillover into humans, but helps conservation veterinarians and disease experts understand the natural host-pathogen relationship, allowing us to better conserve wildlife populations and save species," said Caroline Moore, DVM, Ph.D., Steel Endowed Pathology Fellow and veterinary toxicologist on San Diego Zoo Global's Disease Investigations team, who was among the co-authors.

"The proposed disease surveillance model will help us inventory naturally occurring pathogens in different taxa across the globe, enabling us to track future changes in viruses and ecosystem health that are relevant to both humans and wildlife populations," added Carmel Witte, Ph.D., wildlife epidemiologist on San Diego Zoo Global's Disease Investigations team.

The authors point out the value of biobanking efforts, including those of San Diego Zoo Global's Frozen Zoo®, in assisting the worldwide surveillance effort.

This decentralized system is consistent with the collaborative, holistic disease mitigation strategy of the One Health approach, used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This approach seeks to decrease the threat of disease through the conservation of nature and ecosystem function, accounting for domestic animals and all other human-related factors.

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About San Diego Zoo Global

Bringing species back from the brink of extinction is the goal of San Diego Zoo Global. As a leader in conservation, the work of San Diego Zoo Global includes on-site wildlife conservation efforts (representing both plants and animals) at the San Diego Zoo, San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, as well as international field programs on six continents. The work of these entities is made accessible to over 1 billion people annually, reaching 150 countries via social media, our websites and the San Diego Zoo Kids network, in children's hospitals in 12 countries. The work of San Diego Zoo Global is made possible with support from our incredible donors committed to saving species from the brink of extinction. To learn more, visit SanDiegoZooGlobal.org or connect with us on Facebook.

Climate change linked to risk of viruses jumping species in the Arctic environment

 27 August 2021

By Adam Vaughan

Lake Hazen base camp on Ellesmere Island

Wolfgang Kaehler / Alamy Stock Photo

Climate change may increase the risk of viruses becoming capable of infecting new hosts in the Arctic, suggests a study of genetic material from a Canadian lake.

Canadian scientists found that an increase in glacier melt at Lake Hazen, the Arctic’s largest lake by volume and a location in George Clooney’s film The Midnight Sky, was linked to a greater risk of viral spillover, where a virus infects a new host for the first time. Melting glaciers were considered a proxy of climate change, which is causing their retreat globally.

The team from the University of Ottawa, led by Audrée Lemieux, gathered soil and sediment from the lake and sequenced the RNA and DNA in the samples. The researchers found signatures of viruses and their potential hosts including animals, plants and fungi. They then ran an algorithm recently developed by a different research team, which assesses the chance of coevolution or symbiosis among unrelated groups of organisms. The algorithm allowed the team to gauge the risk of spillover, and suggested this was higher in lake samples nearer to the point where larger tributaries – carrying more meltwater from nearby glaciers – flow into the lake.

“Our main finding is we show that for this specific lake, the spillover risk increases with the melting of glaciers. It’s not the same thing as predicting pandemics – we’re not crying wolf,” says Lemieux.

She says the risk of infectious diseases emerging from the Arctic is low today due to the region’s paucity of “bridge vectors”, such as mosquitoes, that can spread viruses to other species. However, the researchers note that climate change not only melts glaciers, but is also expected to cause more species to move towards the poles, which they warn “could have dramatic effect in the High Arctic”.

Read more: A deadly seal virus may be spreading faster due to melting Arctic ice

Exactly how glacier melt might increase spillover risk isn’t entirely clear from simply running the algorithm. Co-author Stéphane Aris-Brosou says one idea is that extra run-off simply increases the mixing of species because their local environment is disturbed, physically bringing together viruses and potential new hosts that wouldn’t otherwise encounter each other.

Most of the viruses found were plant and fungal ones. Other researchers question how many would be sufficiently intact, or in high enough concentrations, to remain infectious. “Much of the fragmented DNA or RNA they find will represent degraded viral genomes that no longer present a risk,” says Alex Greenwood at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany.

Lemieux and Aris-Brosou say another caveat is that this is the first time the spillover algorithm has been used in this way, so more studies will be needed to calibrate the true risk.

The threat of diseases emerging from the Arctic due to a warming world came to the fore in 2016 with a deadly anthrax outbreak in people in Siberia linked to the thawing of frozen ground uncovering a long-dead infected reindeer. “Are there potentially new viruses that the melting of the permafrost is going to wake up? As scientists, we ought to know, but we are really into the unknown unknowns,” says Aris-Brosou. Lemieux is now studying the team’s data to see if she can identify new viruses.

Reference: bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2021.08.23.457348

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Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2288529-climate-change-linked-to-risk-of-viruses-jumping-species-in-the-arctic/#ixzz74tt1vPTO

ZOONOSIS

Fuzzy, Cute, and ... Viral? Bats A Likely Source Of Future Pandemics

William A. Haseltine
FORBES
Jan 20, 2024


Flying bat hunting in forest. The grey long-eared bat (Plecotus austriacus) is a fairly large ... [+]GETTY

One of the many lessons from our —ongoing— battle with Covid-19 is that viral transfer from wild animals to humans, known as zoonosis, is a very real threat. And this isn’t the first time it’s happened: SARS-CoV-1, AIDS, and Ebola can all be put into the same category. Indeed, roughly 60% of epidemics can be traced back to an animal origin. The thing is, the sources of zoonotic diseases aren't always “exotic” animals that only infrequently come into contact with humans. One of the major zoonotic culprits is markedly more quotidian: bats. Viral spillover from these furry vampires leads to higher fatality rates than spillover events from other animals. Why is that? A new study published in PLOS Biology suggests it may all be in the wings.

Predicting Animal Spillovers

Although entirely preventing zoonotic spillovers will be difficult, we can strive to strengthen our public health systems to help minimize the effect of future occurrences. A key part of this process is honing our understanding of the threats. Which animal populations present the largest risk? Which taxonomic orders give rise to the most virulent viruses? In effect, where should we be looking?

One shorthand approach has been to focus on phylogenetic relationships, which describe how closely or how distantly different animals are related to one another based on their evolutionary history. In general, spillover events across animal orders that are more distantly related to one another lead to high viral virulence. Note that increased viral virulence doesn’t always mean increased overall mortality: if a virus is too virulent, it kills off its host before it has a chance to transmit to a new host. This is known as trade-off theory. So, the animal populations most likely to saddle us with virulent viruses are not necessarily those most likely to saddle us with pandemics. Still, as evidenced by Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, unlikely and impossible are two different things.

Though a useful heuristic, phylogenetic relationships don’t completely predict the virulence of spillover events. Think of it as a very coarse sieve — it filters out the largest debris but fails to capture a lot of the smaller particles. The researchers, by collecting data from a large number of spillover studies and generating a statistical model, set out to provide a finer sieve. In particular, they wanted to pinpoint the features of bat immune systems that predispose them to becoming viral reservoirs. Other animals with similar immune systems, it would stand to reason, may pose a similar risk.

Flight and Inflammation: What’s the Connection?

Bats are masters at hosting viruses while remaining mostly unaffected by their presence. This includes viruses which, in other animals, would usually cause serious disease or death. They are also extremely adept at keeping viral load —the total amount of virus present in an organism— low. In some sense, bats are perfect viral incubators; they provide viruses with a home to reproduce and evolve, all free of charge. That’s why bat viruses that make the transition into human hosts are often so deadly, they’ve had years to improve overall fitness.

How is it that the bats themselves are not affected by the viruses? Well, bats are the only winged mammals — all other animals of flight are either insects or birds. And flight is not an easy thing. It is extremely taxing at the metabolic level, requiring a great deal of effort and energy. So much so that it causes oxidative stress, which happens when oxygen-containing molecules build up more quickly than the body’s ability to break them down. Left unaddressed, this can cause DNA damage and chronic inflammation. But if every time a bat took flight its inflammatory response kicked in, it would be in a constant state of inflammation. This is, of course, far from optimal. A little inflammation is crucial to healing, yes, but too much of it will end up harming otherwise healthy tissues and organs. To avoid this, bats seem to have developed a heightened tolerance for inflammation. In short, it takes a great deal to trigger a bat’s inflammatory response.

At the genetic level, these adaptations are reflected by decreased activation or wholesale loss of many of the genes associated with inflammation. These include heavy hitters like NLRP3 (NLR family pyrin domain containing 3) and other genes involved in an important inflammatory signaling pathway called NF-κB (nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells)

So while the increased tolerance to inflammation likely evolved to help bats fly, it also had the added benefits of boosting their longevity —bats are extraordinarily long-lived relative to their body size— and of letting them come away from viral infections mostly unscathed. Combined, this makes bats an excellent breeding ground for new viruses: their inflammatory response is rarely triggered by circulating viruses, giving the viruses a chance to replicate and mutate undisturbed. And since bats aren’t usually affected by the viruses they carry, the viruses can crank up the dial on virulence without fear of killing their hosts. A foolproof recipe for dangerously fit viruses.

Bats and Antiviral Genes

A recent study also discovered that horseshoe bats lack an antiviral variant of a gene called OAS1 (2'-5'-oligoadenylate synthetase 1). In humans, the OAS1 gene comes in two different forms, one short and the other long. During the height of the pandemic, researchers noticed that the majority of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 carried the shorter variant of the gene. Follow-up experiments revealed that the longer variant of the gene included vital information that helped carriers’ immune systems identify and destroy the RNA of SARS-CoV-2.

How? The protein produced by the longer gene variant carries a signal that allows it to be modified by the addition of a fat molecule, a process called prenylation. The addition of the fat molecule lets the OAS1 protein associate with cellular membranes. A common tactic employed by SARS-CoV-2, and other such viruses, is to “cloak” itself in a specialized replication compartment called a double-membrane vesicle. This compartment allows the virus to hide its RNA from our immune system. The longer version of OAS1, however, cuts through this viral tactic; by binding to cellular membranes, it can penetrate the replication compartment, locate the viral RNA, and sound the alarm bells.

As it turns out, horseshoe bats lack the protective version of the gene. At some point in time, they “lost” the variant to evolution. Instead, they only have the shorter version, which doesn’t offer any antiviral benefits. Why the bats lost the protective variant of the gene remains unclear, and what the current version of the gene does is equally unknown. A reasonable guess would be that the loss of the protective variant is part of the general trend towards an increased tolerance of inflammation, but more work needs to be done to piece together this particular puzzle.

Takeaways

This study provides us with a new, more fine-tuned way of predicting future viral spillover events. In particular, it helps direct our gaze to those mammals most likely to saddle us with highly virulent viruses. By studying bats, a well-known source of zoonotic outbreaks, the researchers managed to pinpoint key features that prefigure the evolution of quickly replicating viruses: hosts with protracted lifespans for their body size, which often indicates a heightened tolerance for inflammation, and hosts with strong constitutive immune responses. Viral tolerance, which is the ability to be exposed to high viral loads without suffering health consequences, is especially relevant to the development of virulent viruses.

The findings also raise an interesting question regarding the role and helpfulness of inflammation. Clearly, some degree of inflammation is necessary for successful immune function, but if bats are anything to go by, the less inflammation the better. Despite being chock full of viruses, they often suffer no adverse health effects. They also live long and healthy lives. Indeed, persistent inflammation is considered a hallmark of aging in humans. Excessive inflammation is also linked to numerous disorders in humans. Perhaps the bats are onto something.

Of course, as is the case for any model, we need to take the results with a grain of salt. A model is only as accurate as the data it is based on. The more data, and the better the quality of the data, the better the predictions of the model. Still, the model the researchers generated has provided useful hypotheses that can now be experimentally tested, both in cell culture and in vivo.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. 

William A. Haseltine

I am a scientist, businessman, author, and philanthropist. For nearly two decades, I was a professor at Harvard 

The spillover effects of rising energy prices following 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

Analysis of the effect of energy prices on the global prices and social surplus using the monthly input-output model of 56 sectors in 44 countries

Peer-Reviewed Publication

KYUSHU UNIVERSITY

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine from February 24, 2022, energy prices rose by up to 20% worldwide for five months. WTI crude oil was $92.77 per barrel on February 24, 2022, but rose and averaged $106.96 (+15.3%) from February 28 to August 3. Furthermore, energy consumer price indexes (energy CPI) increased consecutively for five months, when comparing February and July, in OECD (18.0%) and G-7 (18.9%) countries, hitting their highest year-over-year growths ever since tracking began in 1971 in OECD (40.70%) and G-7 (39.43%) in June 2022. 

Because energy use is merely an intermediate input, rising energy prices may have little impact on real gross domestic product (GDP). Meanwhile, rising energy prices may decrease social surplus, slowing economic growth. When energy prices rise, consumers primarily buy less durable goods, e.g., cars and new houses, and firms may reduce their investment spending due to uncertainty. Also, because fossil fuels are primarily used as intermediate inputs upstream in the supply chain, higher energy prices lead to higher global costs (due to spillover effects). 

For such a shock analysis, input-output analysis (IOA) is favored to examine the spillover effects in the supply chain. In particular, the Leontief quantity model—the most popular demand-driven model—is the de-facto standard for both demand and supply analysis. However, it has issues. The model is not theoretically consistent with the supply analysis, and, more importantly, it is likely to overestimate monetary damage because price and quantity are inelastic.

A new study from researchers at Kyushu University finds that if the price increases by 20% in Russia’s mining and quarrying (M&Q) sector alone, there will be almost no effects globally. That is, global prices will rise by only 0.13% across all sectors globally (weighted average), reducing social surplus by 0.28% of the pre-invasion monthly GDP ($22,295 million per month).

Meanwhile, if prices increased by 20% globally in every M&Q sector, global prices will rise by 3.15% across all sectors, reducing the social surplus by 6.83% of the pre-invasion monthly GDP ($551,080 million per month). This case is roughly equivalent to Russian M&Q (energy) prices being five times higher (+497%), demonstrating the magnitude of geopolitical risk. 

Research Lecturer Michiyuki Yagi and Professor Shunsuke Managi in the Urban Institute and the Department of Civil Engineering, Kyushu University, reached these conclusions by updating the world IO table to 2021 values (56 sectors in 44 countries) and analyzing the two scenarios above using the Leontief price model with the exogenous price elasticity of demand at the monthly level, a method developed by the authors in 2020*. As advantages, this model is theoretically suitable for supply analysis and will not overestimate monetary damages because price and quantity are perfectly elastic to each other. 

Regarding the policy implications, with a price change of only 20%, Russia’s energy sector alone has little global impact because the economic scale is relatively small. Second, if energy prices rise globally, the most affected are three energy-related sectors (M&Q, coke/petroleum, and electricity and gas supply), metal, mineral products, electrical equipment, chemical products (manufacturers), air transport, and construction (service sectors). Finally, if energy prices rise, policymakers should focus on the downstream sectors of buyers or consumers. They will be more damaged than sellers or producers as they have to buy fewer quantities at higher prices. In terms of energy (fossil fuel) prices, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (was an economic shock that) cost consumers or buyers (in the world) primarily 2.85% of the pre-invasion annual GDP ($2.7 trillion) in five months following the invasion.

The results of this research was published online in the journal Economic Analysis and Policy (the Economic Society of Australia) on January 4, 2023.

For more information about this research, see “The spillover effects of rising energy prices following 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Michiyuki Yagi and Shunsuke Managi, Economic Analysis and Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eap.2022.12.025

 

*Yagi, M., Kagawa, S., Managi, S., Fujii, H., Guan, D., 2020. Supply Constraint from Earthquakes in Japan in Input-Output Analysis. Risk Analysis. vol. 40 (9), pp.1811-1830. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13525

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About Kyushu University

Kyushu University is one of Japan’s leading research-oriented institutes of higher education since its founding in 1911. Home to around 19,000 students and 8,000 faculty and staff, Kyushu U's world-class research centers cover a wide range of study areas and research fields, from the humanities and arts to engineering and medical sciences. Its multiple campuses—including the largest in Japan—are located around Fukuoka City, a coastal metropolis on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu that is frequently ranked among the world’s most livable cities and historically known as a gateway to Asia.
 

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JOURNAL

Economic Analysis and Policy

DOI

10.1016/j.eap.2022.12.025 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

ARTICLE TITLE

The spillover effects of rising energy prices following 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

Are bats to blame for the coronavirus crisis?

by Diana Yates, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Illinois Natural History Survey wildlife biologist Tara Hohoff holds a bat during mist netting to collect data on bat populations in central Illinois. Credit: Steve Taylor

Horseshoe bats in China are a natural wildlife reservoir of SARS-like coronaviruses. Some health experts think wildlife markets—specifically in Wuhan, China—led to the spillover of the new coronavirus into human populations. Though not confirmed, the hypothesis has given bats around the world a bad rap, and public fears of exposure to bats are on the rise. Illinois Natural History Survey wildlife biologist Tara Hohoff, the project coordinator of the Illinois Bat Conservation Program, spoke to News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates about bat biology and conservation, and the flying mammals' role in human health.

Are bats a danger to humans?

Generally, no, bats do not endanger people. Bats can be carriers of diseases such as coronaviruses and rabies, but these diseases are not a danger to humans unless people come into contact with bat blood or saliva—a rare occurrence in the U.S. Rabies can be contracted from almost any mammal species, but is commonly reported in bats, raccoons, skunks and foxes. Because bat species are able to withstand and survive infection with many viruses, there is a lot of interest in researching how their immune systems respond to these infections.

What are other common misconceptions about bats?

People tend to believe that bats are like rodents, that all bat species are similar, that they commonly carry dangerous diseases and that they seek to interact with humans—for example, by flying into their hair. But bats are not closely related to rodents and they are an incredibly diverse order of animals. They range from very tiny bumblebee bats that live in caves to large flying foxes. Bat species worldwide eat a wide range of food, including fruit, nectar, insects and fish.

Most bats try to stay as far away from humans as possible, but this is made more challenging as we continue to take away their habitat. Many bat species here in the Midwest prefer to roost in the shaggy bark of dead trees, but as there are fewer trees available, the bats may find their only shelter in people's attics, sheds and garages. This puts them in close proximity to humans where unwanted interactions may occur.

What is the relationship between wildlife markets and the emergence of diseases like the new coronavirus?

Wildlife markets commonly have numerous types of animals that have been harvested from the wild kept in very close proximity to one another. These are animals that would not naturally come into contact with one another. Sometimes live and dead animals are stacked on top of one another, making the transfer of blood or saliva commonplace. People who work in these markets or who purchase animals for the exotic animal trade or for culinary uses are at high risk of exposure to a multitude of diseases.

What is a spillover event? What factors influence whether this occurs?

A spillover event occurs when a pathogen is transferred from its host species to a new species, typically through unnatural contact such as occurs in a wildlife market. The historical host species may have evolved some immunity to the pathogen, while the newly affected species will likely have no natural resistance, making it susceptible to an outbreak.

Some factors that influence the potential for spillover in a wildlife market include the level of infection, sanitary conditions, food preparation methods and the pathogen's compatibility with the newly exposed species. Another interesting factor that influences whether an exposure will turn into an outbreak is how deadly the pathogen is. Diseases that quickly kill their hosts have reduced opportunities to infect new individuals, while less deadly diseases can spread to more individuals.

Is there a solution to this problem?

It is important to reiterate that bats do not choose to interact with humans. We put ourselves at risk when we take animals from the wild and bring them into contact with humans—as occurs, for example, in the Netflix documentary series "Tiger King." We also endanger ourselves when we don't think carefully about how we source animal-derived products, when we destroy habitat, when we live in close proximity to wildlife and when we feed and habituate wildlife to humans. We need to respect wildlife for what it should be, which is wild.

How do bat research and conservation aid human health and society?

Bats are an incredible group of organisms for research because they are so diverse. Their evolution of flight, echolocation (in many species) and adaptations for being nocturnal are all fascinating areas for research. Many species of bats are very long-lived considering their size, so scientists are interested in studying how they age. As mentioned earlier, species such as horseshoe bats have unique immune systems that allow them to survive infectious diseases that are detrimental to other species. We have a lot to learn about how that is possible.

Also, many species of bats perform vital ecosystem services that are useful to human health and economics, such as eating insects, pollinating plants by feeding on nectar and dispersing fruit seeds. For example, researchers at Southern Illinois University estimated that insectivore bat species provide about $1 billion globally in suppression of insects that damage corn crops. Here in Illinois, the suppression of agricultural pests is incredibly important, but we also benefit when local bats consume backyard pests like mosquitoes.Spillover: Why germs jump species from animals to people

Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Individual risk-factor data could help predict the next Ebola outbreak, new study shows

Researchers confirm a relationship between social, economic and demographic factors and the propensity for individuals to engage in behaviors that expose them to Ebola spillover

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LEHIGH UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: JAVIER BUCETA (FRONT LEFT), A FACULTY MEMBER AT THE INSTITUTE FOR INTEGRATIVE SYSTEMS BIOLOGY, AND PAOLO BOCCHINI (FRONT RIGHT), PROFESSOR OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING AT LEHIGH UNIVERSITY. view more 

CREDIT: STEPHANIE VETO/LEHIGH UNIVERSITY

Several years ago, a team of scientists at Lehigh University developed a predictive model to accurately forecast Ebola outbreaks based on climate-driven bat migration. Ebola is a serious and sometimes-deadly infectious disease that is zoonotic, or enters a human population via interaction with animals. It is widely believed that the source of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which killed more than 11,000 people, was human interaction with bats.

Now members of the team have examined how social and economic factors, such as level of education and general knowledge of Ebola, might contribute to “high-risk behaviors” that may bring individuals into contact with potentially infected animals. A focus on geographical locations with high concentrations of individuals at high-risk could help public health officials better target prevention and education resources.  

“We created a survey that combined the collection of social, demographic and economic data with questions related to general knowledge of Ebola transmission and potentially high-risk behaviors,” says Paolo Bocchini, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh and one of the study’s leaders. “Our results show that it is indeed possible to calibrate a model to predict, with a reasonable level of accuracy, the propensity of an individual to engage in high-risk behaviors.”

For example, the team’s data and analyses suggested Kailahun, a town in Eastern Sierra Leone, and Kambia in the northern part of the country, as the rural districts in the country with the highest likelihood of infection spillover, based on individual risk factors accurately identifying the location, Kailahun, where the 2014 Ebola epidemic is believed to have originated.

The results are detailed in a paper “Estimation of Ebola’s spillover infection exposure in Sierra Leone based on sociodemographic and economic factors” which will soon be published in PLOS ONE. Additional authors include: Lehigh University graduate student Sena Mursel, undergraduates Nathaniel Alter, Lindsay Slavit and Anna Smith; and Javier Buceta, a faculty member at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology in Valencia, Spain.

Among the findings: young adults (ages between 18-34) and adults (ages between 34 - 50) were most at risk in the population they studied. This group constituted 77% of the investigated sample, but 86% of the respondents were at risk. In addition, those with agricultural jobs were among the most at risk: 50% of the study respondents have an agriculture-related occupation, but represent 79% of respondents at risk

“We confirmed a relationship between social, economic and demographic factors and the propensity for individuals to engage in behaviors that expose them to Ebola spillover,” says Bocchini. “We also calibrated a preliminary model that quantifies this relationship.”

The authors say these results point to the need for a holistic approach for any model seeking to accurately predict disease outbreaks. Their findings may also be useful for population health officials, who may be able to use such models to better focus scarce resources.

“One has to look at the big picture,” says Bocchini. “We collected satellite images that showed the evolution of enviro-climatic data and combined them with ecological models and random field models to capture the spatial and temporal fluctuations of natural resources and the resulting continent-wide migrations of infected animal carriers. We also studied the human population’s social, economic, demographic and behavioral characteristics, integrating everything to obtain our predictions.”

“Only this broad perspective and interdisciplinary approach can truly capture these dynamics, and with this line of research we are proving that it works,” adds Bocchini.

“In the end, the conclusions of our study are not that surprising: greater economic means, more education, and access to information are key factors to reduce health-related high-risk behaviors” said Buceta. “Indeed, some of these factors have been related with what is known as the ‘health poverty trap.’ Our study and methodology show how quantitative analyses concerning individual, rather than aggregated, data can be used to identify these factors.”   

To collect data for their study, Bocchini and Buceta traveled to Sierra Leone with a delegation of undergraduate students from Lehigh with support from the National Institutes of Health, Lehigh’s Office of Creative Inquiry and in collaboration with nonprofit World Hope International. The assistance of two local translators was critical to the team’s success in administering their survey door-to-door. The students who worked on the project were part of Lehigh’s Global Social Impact Fellowship program which engages undergraduate and graduate students in work focused on addressing sustainable development challenges in low- and middle-income countries. 

“This is precisely the kind of ambitious interdisciplinary project with tremendous potential for social impact that we want Lehigh students to engage with through the Global Social Impact Fellowship,” says Khanjan Mehta, Vice Provost for Creative Inquiry at Lehigh. “Students from various disciplines across Lehigh had the opportunity to contribute to this work under Dr. Bocchini and Dr. Buceta’s leadership.”

The team’s promising results are a strong argument for broader data collection and they are in conversations with Statistics Sierra Leone, the country’s census bureau, to perform a nationwide version of their study.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0271886 

ARTICLE TITLE

Estimation of Ebola's spillover infection exposure in Sierra Leone based on sociodemographic and economic factors

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Sep-2022

Environmental Destruction Brought Us COVID-19. What It Brings Next Could Be Far Worse.

Jimmy Tobias, HuffPost•April 21, 2020

(Photo: Illustration: Jun Cen for HuffPost)
Dr. Richard Kock was on duty at London’s Royal Veterinary College in January 2017 when he received an urgent message from international health officials. He was needed for an emergency response mission in the Mongolian countryside, where a deadly viral outbreak was underway.

He packed his things, caught a flight to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar and drove for two days into the arid steppe. He found a disturbing scene: frozen corpses scattered on hillsides, burn pits stacked with bodies and residents addled with anxiety.

But this pandemic was not targeting humans. It was goat plague, a lethal and highly infectious virus that has killed goats, sheep and other small ruminants in huge numbers since it was first detected last century. There is a vaccine, but its application in Mongolia had been botched. The virus had spilled from domestic livestock into local populations of critically endangered saiga antelope, and it wiped out about 85% of the infected, Kock said.

“Nearly everything died across a huge landscape,” said Kock, who has worked for decades to stem infectious diseases around the world. There are only a few thousand saiga antelope left in Mongolia today, largely due to the goat plague.

The only comforting element of this tale is that the disease is not transmissible to humans. At least, not yet.

But Kock worries. Goat plague is a paramyxovirus, a virus in the same family as measles. Its case fatality rate can be as high as 90%, and some animals that contract it can infect eight to 12 others.

“They are nasty viruses,” Kock said, adding that they’re formidable in their spread and aggressiveness. It wouldn’t take a big tweak in the goat plague’s genome ― “just two amino acids, essentially” ― for it to become infectious to humans, he said. “In theory, it is very possible.”

Residents pay for groceries by standing on chairs to peer over barriers set up by a wet market on a street in Wuhan, the epicenter of China's coronavirus outbreak, on April 1. (Photo: Aly Song / Reuters)

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, killing thousands and crushing the global economy, the potential threat of zoonotic spillover — when novel viruses and bacteria jump from animals to people — is becoming increasingly clear. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 almost certainly originated in bats and is believed to have spilled into humans at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. Readily transmissible and far deadlier than the seasonal flu, COVID-19 is now one of the worst pandemics of animal origin that humans have faced in a century. But it won’t be the last.

There are millions of viruses and bacteria out there that reside in wild animals and can potentially infect humans, and these emerging diseases are on the rise everywhere as humans disrupt ecosystems and exploit animal habitat across the globe. We are living in an age of pandemics, and the next one — let’s call it “Disease X,” as scientists often do — could be even more devastating than COVID-19.

“On a scale of 1 to 100, we could place [the current outbreak] probably somewhere a little below midway,” said Dennis Carroll, the chair of the Global Virome Project and former director of the emerging threats division at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Some known viruses circulating today have much higher mortality rates than the novel coronavirus but don’t spread easily among humans. If one of them mutated and became highly infectious in humans, Carroll said, Disease X could make this pandemic “look like a warmup.”

Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island, which is in the Bronx borough of New York City, earlier this month. (Photo: John Minchillo/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

A Plague Rooted In Environmental Destruction

Political leaders are taking unprecedented measures to contain a virus that has infected at least 2.31 million people, killed at least 157,000 and forced national economies to their knees. Yet those unprecedented measures address only the symptoms of this crisis, an entirely reactionary response that has so far avoided addressing the root causes of novel disease emergence.

“COVID-19 is just the latest zoonotic disease to emerge that has its roots in the rampant habitat loss occurring around the world and the burgeoning wildlife trade,” a group of more than 100 conservation organizations wrote in a letter to the U.S. Congress last month, urging it to include in its stimulus bill new funding to combat the conditions that give rise to outbreaks like COVID-19. “Global pandemics will likely continue and even escalate if action isn’t taken.”

So far, though, Congress has failed to act on that threat, and the Trump administration is exacerbating the problem with its relentless campaign to roll back wildlife protections and cut environmental programs at home and abroad. All the while, the threat of zoonotic disease continues to intensify.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is just the latest infectious agent to jump from animals into people. HIV, Ebola, Marburg virus, SARS, MERS, Zika ― those, too, originated in animals and are part of the same perilous trend of novel diseases that have surfaced with increasing frequency as population growth, industrial agriculture, deforestation, wildlife exploitation, urban sprawl and other human activities bring our species into continuous contact with animal-borne pathogens.

“Emerging infectious diseases, the majority of which are zoonotic and have their origin in wildlife, have been increasing significantly — both numbers of outbreaks and diversity of diseases — over the past 50 years,” said Dr. Christian Walzer, chief global veterinarian at the New York City-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

The majority of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, a 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications concluded, and “their emergence often involves dynamic interactions among populations of wildlife, livestock, and people within rapidly changing environments.” A 2015 study found that land use changes, such as urban expansion and deforestation, is the single most significant driver of many of the zoonotic outbreaks that have occurred since 1940.

“In the broadest sense, humans are the main drivers of zoonotic disease outbreaks,” said Catherine Machalaba, a policy adviser and research scientist at the EcoHealth Alliance.

A small island of trees in a clear-cut pine forest. Dramatic changes in land use have contributed to the rise of zoonotic diseases. (Photo: eppicphotography via Getty Images)
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought global attention to live wild animal markets, which are common throughout Southeast Asia and Africa and which scientists say provide ideal conditions for new pandemics to spawn. The markets, which are often located in dense, urban areas, bring a wide variety of domestic and wild species, living and dead, into contact with humans. They are potential petri dishes for novel pathogens to evolve and spread.

It is at one such “wet market” in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, that the novel coronavirus, labeled SARS-CoV-2, is believed to have first spilled from its original host (thought to be a bat) into an intermediary host species or directly into humans. The crowded market featured dozens of live and dead animals for sale that rarely, if ever, come in contact in the wild, from fish and rats to monkeys and foxes. These markets are poorly regulated, and endangered species are known to end up in them.

This coronavirus crossed over to humans in China, but the spillover of such diseases is occurring all over the world, including in the United States. Walzer points, for instance, to the rise of Lyme disease in North America, where our suburban developments and shopping malls wiped out wild forests, killed native predators, amplified rodent and deer populations, and fueled outbreaks of the tick-borne illness.

“It’s the classic example of how biodiversity loss has increased the risk for spillover,” Walzer said.

Consider also Nipah, a paramyxovirus, like the goat plague, that first appeared in Malaysia in 1998. That virus — an inspiration for the 2011 film “Contagion” — has its origins in fruit bats, but it spilled over to pigs on a farm where livestock pens abutted mango trees that bats used as a food source.

“Bats were coming in in large numbers, feeding on mangos and, in the process of chewing on the mango, they would drop mangos laden with mucus and other body fluids into the pig pens,” said Jonathan Epstein, vice president for science and outreach at the EcoHealth Alliance, which works to study and prevent zoonotic disease spillover. “That is how it started.”

Nipah does not harm bats. But it sickened pigs and soon infected humans, too. First, it spread to workers on the farm. Then, as pigs were traded around the country, it infected other humans. By the end of the outbreak in 1999, 265 people had contracted the virus and more than 100 had died. Malaysian authorities, meanwhile, had slaughtered millions of pigs to staunch the infection’s spread.

But the story doesn’t end there. Nipah, scientists soon discovered, was also in Bangladesh. Since the early 2000s, the country has suffered from a series of recurrent outbreaks that have claimed scores of lives. In these cases, however, there were no pigs involved. The virus spread here happened via sap from date palm plants, which some in Bangladesh harvest and drink raw in the winter months. Fruit bats have learned to exploit this food source, too, and their saliva, urine and droppings sometimes fall into the pots that people use to collect the palm sap. In this way, scientists say, Nipah has spread from bats to Bangladeshis.

“Nipah is a scary virus because it is super deadly,” said Epstein, who has studied the virus’s spread and notes that it has a case fatality rate in Bangladesh of about 75%.

But there’s another reason Nipah keeps disease experts up at night: Humans can spread the virus directly to each other, with no animal intermediary necessary.

“Nipah has shown human-to-human transmission consistently in Bangladesh, and that is why it is among the top listed infectious disease threats,” Epstein said. “It is only a matter of time before a version of Nipah virus gets into people, one that is both deadly and highly transmissible.”

In other words, there’s no need to speculate about the spillover of a scary disease like goat plague when Nipah is already on the scene.

Live animal markets and COVID-19. Degraded forests and Lyme disease. Agricultural production, disrupted bat habitat and a petrifying new paramyxovirus. These examples all tell the same story: Humanity’s effect on the natural world, and on wildlife especially, is causing novel pathogens to infect, harm and kill us. When we mine, drill, bulldoze and overdevelop, when we traffic in wild animals and invade intact habitat, when we make intimate contact with birds, bats, primates, rodents and more, we run an intensifying risk of contracting one of the estimated 1.6 million unknown viruses that reside in the bodies of other species.

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A monkey is kept in a cage for sale at an animal market in Jakarta, Indonesia, in May 2007. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

Far From An ‘Unforeseen Problem’
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has consistently undermined science as part of his pro-development, anti-environment agenda. And the administration’s response to COVID-19 has, unsurprisingly, been defined by similar denial.

Trump spent weeks downplaying the threat, only to suddenly change his tune and insist that no one could have possibly predicted or prepared for such a devastating pandemic. He described the outbreak as an “unforeseen problem,” “something that nobody expected.”

But a crisis of this magnitude was not only possible, it was all but inevitable. Many people, from business leaders to intelligence officials to infectious diseases experts, have been saying so for years.

“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in a 2015 Ted Talk, stressing that the U.S. and the world at large are wildly unprepared to respond.

Even Trump’s own appointees in the intelligence community had issued warnings.
“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” says the 42-page Worldwide Threat Assessment that then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2019.

The report highlights stalled progress in combating infectious diseases such as malaria and the measles, as well as the link between emerging pathogens and human encroachment.

“The growing proximity of humans and animals has increased the risk of disease transmission,” it says. “The number of outbreaks has increased in part because pathogens originally found in animals have spread to human populations.”

And yet the Trump administration was caught unprepared, confused and unable to craft a coherent strategy to tackle the threat. Indeed, even in mid-March, the president was still comparing COVID-19 to the seasonal flu.

Beyond their hapless response, Trump and his Cabinet have also promoted a slew of policies that actively exacerbate the potential for zoonotic spillover.

Since taking power in 2017, the Trump administration has been on an anti-environment bonanza, rolling back wildlife and land protections while also working to cut funding for key international conservation programs that help prevent the sort of activities that give rise to infectious disease emergence. In its proposed budget for fiscal year 2021, for instance, the administration seeks to cut more than $300 million from critical USAID and State Department programs that combat wildlife trafficking, conserve large landscapes and otherwise promote biodiversity and wildlife protection abroad.

“USAID is one of the largest global donors for biodiversity conservation,” said Kelly Keenan Aylward, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Washington, D.C., office.

She pointed, for instance, to the agency’s Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment, a landscape-scale effort that focuses on combating wildlife trafficking and deforestation, two key drivers of biodiversity loss. USAID, Aylward said, also funds essential biodiversity programs in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, among other places.

A poisonous, critically endangered golden mantella frog in the rainforest of Madagascar. Habitat loss from logging and agriculture has driven the species toward extinction. Trump administration policies have exacerbated the loss of biodiversity. (Photo: Ger Bosma via Getty Images)

Trump and his small army of industry-linked political appointees are also going after the country’s key domestic wildlife agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act and fighting the illegal wildlife trade. In fiscal year 2021, they aim to slash the agency’s budget by roughly $80 million, including significant cuts to its law enforcement programs. They also want to whittle away at the agency’s Multinational Species Conservation Fund, which finances conservation programs for imperiled species abroad.

The administration also finalized regulations that significantly weaken both the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, two bedrock conservation laws. It engineered the largest rollback of public lands protection in U.S. history and has presided over a steep decline in the number of new species listed under the ESA. It has withdrawn U.S. membership in UNESCO, a United Nations program that protects hundreds of natural sites around the world, and earlier this month Trump threatened to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization over its pandemic response, a clear effort to shift blame away from his administration. All this while advocating drastic cuts to U.S.-sponsored global health programs that fight infectious diseases.

Wildlife and land protection programs, advocates say, should be getting more support, not less — especially in light of a raging pandemic that has its origins in environmental destruction and disruption.

“Conservation and wildlife protection efforts must be prioritized in order to protect not only our precious resources,” said Kate Wall, the senior legislative manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, “but the stability of our global economy and, indeed, our very existence.”

‘It Should Be A Defining Movement’

Carroll, the former USAID official, said fighting emerging disease requires social engineering that invests not only in the capability to disrupt future spillover but also measures to manage outbreaks when they occur.

Carroll designed and directed Predict, a USAID disease surveillance program that identified more than 1,000 previously unknown wildlife viruses, including strains of Ebola and dozens of coronaviruses, over the last decade. The project proved that our existing technologies could pinpoint future viral threats. But operating on that scale, it would take centuries to catalog the estimated 1.6 million viruses out there ― what Carroll calls “unknown viral dark matter.”

In September, after $200 million and a decade of virus hunting, Trump’s USAID announced it would not renew the Predict program for another five-year cycle. Carroll left USAID around that time. And on March 31, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the U.S., the administration officially shuttered the program. USAID subsequently granted the program a six-month extension on April 1 to “provide emergency support” to other countries in their response to COVID-19, but the effective cancellation of Predict had already caused real damage — its field work came to a halt months earlier, and some of the organizations that worked on the program were forced to lay off staffers, according to an April report in the Los Angeles Times.

USAID is now in the process of developing a new project, called STOP Spillover, which is expected to be launched this fall and cost $50 million to $100 million over five years. An agency spokesperson told CNN the program will “build on the lessons learned and data gathered” during Predict and “focus on strengthening national capacity to develop, test and implement interventions to reduce the risk of the spillover.”

Carroll now leads the Global Virome Project, a nonprofit that is working to create what he describes as a “global atlas” of animal viruses that would help prepare for, and ideally prevent, pandemics. Mapping viruses by species and location would allow governments to target hot spots for increased surveillance and ecosystem protections.

Carroll also hopes it will make it possible for scientists to develop vaccines that protect humans from not just one virus but perhaps even whole viral families.

“The demise of Predict,” Carroll said, “will only be a tragedy if we don’t continue to invest in viral discovery.”

Workers prepare to spray disinfectant at the Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan, China on March 24, 2020. The city in central China is where the coronavirus first emerged late last year. (Photo: STR via Getty Images)
Disease research and preparing for pandemics isn’t cheap. The Global Virome Project estimates it would cost $1.5 billion over a decade to identify 75% of the unknown viruses in mammals and birds. On the heels of the Ebola crisis in 2016, a commission of global health experts called for an annual global investment of $4.5 billion to help prevent and fight future pandemics, including $3.4 billion to upgrade public health systems across the globe and $1 million for the development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.

But those figures pale in comparison to the costs of a global pandemic, as highlighted by the untold trillions of dollars that COVID-19 is now costing the world economy.

Perhaps the frequency of deadly disease outbreaks ― SARS in 2003, swine flu in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014 and now COVID-19 ― will convince the world it is time for a different approach, Carroll hopes. But he fears that, as with previous outbreaks, resources will dry up once the coronavirus threat dissipates and “collective amnesia” sets in.

“We should not accept the idea that spillover from wildlife into people is inevitable,” he said. “It’s not. Viruses don’t move from animals to people. We facilitate that.”

But we can change our ways.

More than 240 environmental and animal advocacy groups signed an April 6 letter urging the World Health Organization to recommend that governments institute permanent bans on wildlife markets and the use of wildlife in traditional medicines.

To truly solve the underlying conditions that fuel zoonotic pandemics, experts and wildlife conservationists are also calling for a new paradigm that recognizes the interconnection of people, animals and ecosystems, which they call the “One Health” approach.

“It should be a defining movement,” Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, project director of the USAID’s Predict program and associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, said of One Health, which seeks to prevent infectious disease outbreaks by safeguarding wild animals and their habitat.

Humans have driven up to 1 million species around the globe to the brink of extinction, a United Nations report last year found. A U.N. draft biodiversity plan released earlier this year calls for protecting 30% of all lands and oceans by 2030 to combat the biodiversity crisis, which experts say would help keep new infectious diseases at bay.

Other experts told HuffPost that the U.S. should establish a high-level One Health task force that brings together agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Fish and Wildlife Service, USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to chart a course forward for protecting wildlife habitat, strengthening disease surveillance and preventing pandemics.

Still others, like Dr. Richard Kock, say humans must drastically scale back livestock production, which brought the goat plague to Mongolia and fueled the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia.

“Pathogens can move incredibly quickly despite attempts to stop them and despite our technology and our medicines,” Kock said. “It is a wake-up call for humanity.”