Americans may be done with wearing masks, social distancing, and other precautions designed to limit the spread of COVID-19, but viral threats aren’t done with us.
New BA.4 and BA.5 variants are emerging all over the world. The United States has reported an average of about 100,000 new infections daily in the past two months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and actual case counts are potentially higher.
In addition to COVID-19, President Biden recently warned that “everyone should be concerned” about the emergence of monkeypox cases around the world. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has said the virus may become endemic on the continent if the outbreak is not contained soon.
Meanwhile, doctors are struggling to discover what is causing hundreds of healthy children to develop hepatitis. The hypotheses range from a COVID-19 infection to an adenovirus infection, or a combination of both.
As a scientist who researches infectious diseases, I have first-hand experience of the evolution of viral threats. They move fast. To prevent the next pandemic, we must act faster.
That will require putting the lessons we have learned from COVID into action. We need to forge government-industry partnerships, create global coalitions of doctors, scientists, and researchers to monitor and respond to potential outbreaks, and train the next generation of virus hunters.
Our collective response to COVID has been better when the public and private sectors have worked closely together. In the early days of the pandemic, private companies stepped up to rapidly develop and manufacture tests. Today, there are more than 300 Food and Drug Administration-approved COVID-19 tests, and even more available in other countries.
It is essential that the government continue to work with the private sector to identify, procure, and scale up production of key materials to augment our defenses against the pandemic.
This collaboration must span continents and oceans. Viruses know no borders. Neither should our efforts to combat them.
We must make it easy for doctors or researchers facing an unknown disease to share samples and information with scientists around the world to help with identification. Such collective action leads to quicker discoveries and can give the public health community more time and information to assess the magnitude of the threat.
Once scientists identify a threat, we will need access to information on how to combat it. We made great strides in sharing critical scientific information, including viral sequences for new COVID variants. That kind of sharing must continue with future new virus threats. Ensuring rapid access to such information will go a long way in mounting a rapid public health response to any new threat we face.
My team at Abbott and I are working to create these kinds of global partnerships. We recently launched the Abbott Pandemic Defense Coalition, a first-of-its-kind, industry-led initiative that has brought together 15 academic and public health researchers from 12 countries on five continents. The coalition aims to rapidly detect and respond to pandemic threats using a streamlined approach to sharing data and samples.
That approach proved effective when the Omicron variant appeared in South Africa last year. Our partners there shared the sequence and tested samples of the new variant. That allowed us to confirm that our COVID-19 tests could detect it. The coalition is following suit as new variants emerge, including the BA.5.
The coalition is already tracking new viral threats, including the mysterious appearance of pediatric hepatitis. Members are increasing surveillance for people who develop symptoms of monkeypox. Abbott is developing a PCR test for monkeypox that will be provided to coalition members to help identify the virus locally and support genetic testing efforts.
In the meantime, we are keeping an eye on the pathogen that could become the next global pandemic. Regular communication will ensure that we see it coming.
Government, industry, and academia work together more effectively when they trust each other and freely share what they are learning about infectious diseases and emerging public health threats. Each entity will be better able to do its job (monitor dangerous pathogens, build tests at scale, etc.) if it knows that its partners are doing theirs.
In the long term, we must build our virus-hunting workforce. The World Health Organization recommends a global ratio of one field epidemiologist for every 200,000 people. Only a handful of countries have reached that goal.
Initiatives such as the Training Programs in Epidemiology and the Public Health Intervention Network (TEPHINET), which is already training epidemiologists in more than 100 countries, can help.
We must ensure that these scientists have access to cutting-edge technologies that allow them to gain a better understanding of the genetic material of a virus and rapidly test millions of viral samples.
As the saying goes, it takes a village. In this case, the people must be ready to work together to identify emerging viral threats and act quickly to stop the next pandemic.
Gavin A. Cloherty, Ph.D., is head of infectious disease research and the Pandemic Defense Coalition in the diagnostics business at Abbott.
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