Preventing the next pandemic

[amur leopard]

Your points are theoretical

Theoretical on this scale but similar projects have been put in place in the past. For example, the Marshall plan in 1947/48, which provided funds to countries in Europe who had been particularly hardly hit by the war, including Germany, Yugoslavia, France and Britain. It is feasible, but very unlikely.

 

[Ned]

Leave them open then - that is the choice - all it takes is one person, on one plane - multiply that individual risk, and...
Hundreds of strangers in a warm confined metal box, close together, breathing each others air for hours on end, would be called an 'incubator' if it didn't have wings - just so millions of people can have cheap holidays. I think you need to get real. Countries which depend on mass international tourism are in for a permanent hit - or we all risk it again, and see....

On the subject of aircraft passengers spreading infections to each other through recirculated air, I had a read about this recently and found quite a few studies that concluded this in't the case. Apparently the air filters can remove viruses from the air and the air flow is such that the only people who might infect you are the ones sat next to you.

 

[Newzooboy]

This has been covered in other threads repeatedly, along with the consumption of wild animals, called 'bush-meat' in third world and Asian countries and 'game' in the west and developed ones..

A westerner tucking into his game pie, is on thin ice when lecturing a starving African about the rights and wrongs of eating a Duiker.

While I agree with this comment to some extent, it does underestimate the scale of the issue of 'bushmeat'. There was a time when what you describe above was the full extent of bushmeat consumption. However, industrial deforestation and opening up of access to forests has allowed much more bushmeat to be taken than could be consumed. This generates a market for it. So, wild animals are killed for food en masse and far beyond what is required to sustain a local population. Then, this market becomes wider.....it becomes fashionable to eat wild animals (e.g. in China, although I am not in any way saying this is the only place where this happens) and a high price can be charged. This creates stronger market forces, and which make it financially viable to 'harvest' wildlife for consumption a long way away from the source. Lots of people are making money from something they have invested very little in.
This doesn't take any account of other uses of wild animals beyond food - such as the debatable medicinal usefulness of wild animal products.
Farmed animals are medicated to a degree only comparable to humans in order to ensure that the produce is safe for human or pet consumption. Wild animals naturally come with all their inherent parasites and bacterial/ viral infections intact.

 

[Terry Thomas]

Even if this were true - which it is not, as including COVID-19 there have been a total of seven pandemics in the last 100 years, of which all but one have been in your own lifetime - it is not a matter of luck, it is a matter of preparedness and of taking action in timely fashion.

Fair enough! I was actually thinking of world-wide events. Many 'recent events' were not as wide spread as Covid-19 is. As for my comment on luck - I had in mind that we would be lucky not to have another pandemic like this one for a very long time, not that we should not be prepared to quickly take action against the spread. We, the world population, should learn from what has, and still is, occurring, so that when the next one comes we will be able to get some controls into action very much quicker than we have for this one.

 

[Onychorhynchus coronatus]

Though I'd like to believe that I won't see another pandemic of this scale within my lifetime again I know that just isn't going to happen. As long as anthropogenic activities continue to impact and disequilibrate the world's ecosystems there is going to be zoonotic spillover as inevitable ecological blowback and that is just the way it is.

I do believe that there will be much more horizon scanning and research into ecological epidemiology (undoubtedly it will be a good decade to be a disease ecologist / zoonotic epidemiologist though I tend to think conservation will continue to languish behind in funding) and I also think that there will be inevitable improvements into economic and medical preparedness to face future pandemics.

But that doesn't really give me much hope that the next virus wont have the potential to be civilizational cancelling or that we will have the maturity as a species to anticipate it or know how to handle it when the **** hits the fan.