13 Aug 2020
Wildlife Disease Surveillance Focus Group says wildlife must be tested closer to areas of risk – and the wildlife trade needs greater oversight – to avoid repeat of COVID-19.
James Westgate
Job Title
An international disease surveillance group has called for more to be done to monitor zoonotic diseases in the wild to prevent future pandemics.
Scientists from the Wildlife Disease Surveillance Focus Group – which includes members from The University of Edinburgh Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies – have said that to avoid a repeat of COVID-19, wildlife must be tested closer to areas of risk and the wildlife trade needs greater oversight.
Some 89% of known RNA viruses – the class of viruses that SARS-CoV-2, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus and Ebola belong to – have the potential to cause harm to humans and could cross over from animals.
And Anna Meredith, chairman of zoological and conservation medicine at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, believes governments around the world have not done enough to recognise the risks.
Prof Meredith (pictured) said: “There is certainly not as much awareness of the risks as there needs to be. There is growing recognition of this in some countries, but many still do not have the awareness or capacity – or both – to address the risk of zoonotic disease emergence.
“But the focus still tends to be on the human health aspects of a zoonotic disease once it has occurred, rather than focusing on the animal reservoir, and the means of detecting and mitigating these zoonotic pathogen threats before they cause major outbreaks.
“There are so many examples of where this has happened, but we still don’t seem to heed the warnings – [for example,] Nipah, Hendra, Ebola, SARS, MERS.”
Prof Meredith added: “Emerging diseases such as the current COVID-19 pandemic – where a virus has made that jump from wildlife into humans and is now spreading between humans – have shown that so long as there are high levels of human-wildlife interaction, we are at risk of this happening again and again.
“We have to realise the risks we continue to create when we exploit wildlife, destroy their habitat and reduce biodiversity and ecosystem health, and how important wildlife disease surveillance is.”
The group is calling for improvements in testing technology that could help decentralise testing capacity – for example, by using portable DNA sequencers.
These small, cost-effective devices can be used to rapidly detect wildlife pathogens in local testing centres, with wildlife and health care workers trained to conduct tests and submit results.
It is also calling for creation of a publicly accessible database for viruses – something that would help track emerging viruses and help limit their potential impact.
