Former WHO Director Warns: Another Zoonotic Pandemic Could Strike Anytime
New Delhi (The Uttam Hindu): The world can expect another pandemic any day, due to virus spillover from animals, said Mario C.B. Raviglione, former Director of the Global Tuberculosis (TB) Programme at the World Health Organization (WHO) on Sunday.
Speaking exclusively to IANS, Raviglione said that a highly interconnected world is the perfect way for the spread of another pandemic, like COVID-19. “Everyone is expecting another pandemic. This may happen any day because we live in a very interconnected world,” said Raviglione, Full Professor of Global Health at the University of Milan, Italy. “Italy was the first country that was hit in the Western world by Covid. And that is obviously linked to the rapid transportation means that we have nowadays. So in an interconnected world, in a global village, apart from some countries, they are trying their best to rebuild barriers. We know that they exist, unfortunately.
The Professor noted that some countries are trying their best to rebuild barriers by means of conflicts, but we all are “interconnected”. “It is such that, any, particularly respiratory type of disease, viruses, as we have seen, can spread very, very quickly,” he said. He explained that the majority of newly emerging diseases are viral, and they are emerging mostly from the animal world. That means they are zoonosis, like Covid. In the recent past, the world has seen COVID-19, Ebola, chikungunya, West Nile fever, the most recent mPox, and H5N1 influenza -- all related to the animal kingdom in one way or another.
Despite the emerging threats, the preparedness by countries is extremely low, and this will have several implications, Raviglione lamented. “You need to invest. And governments are not particularly keen to invest in something for preparation, for preparedness. They like to invest more because it's more visible. If I have a disease, then I'm going to massively mobilise resources to treat the disease. But it will then be too late to prevent it. So, the issue of preparedness is fundamental,” the expert said. He suggested preparedness hubs to counter and detect new threats in the early phase, citing the example of the Covid pandemic, where world countries were not prepared, and how vaccine inequality led to the loss of so many lives, particularly in the low-income countries.
“Preparedness implies that you need to have the support of laboratories, the support of pharma and biochemical, or the biochemical sector to rapidly develop the test, not just in Europe or in North America, but also in India, also in other countries,” Raviglione said. He urged that the BRICS countries should have this kind of mechanism in place in such a way that if there is a need for a vaccine, then certain conditions can be applied regardless of the patent.
