Researchers at Washington State University recently began a $125 million project to help identify and prevent future pandemics with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The five-year project will collaborate with as many as 12 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to identify previously unknown pathogens with a high potential to spread from animals to humans, a phenomenon known as spillover. Scientific and institutional partners within each country will safely conduct large-scale animal surveillance programs in their own laboratories.
According to Tom Kawula, director of the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health at WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine, the goal of the project is also to develop infrastructure in each country that joins the effort. The project will focus on uncovering zoonotic diseases from three viral families: coronaviruses, filoviruses and paramyxoviruses. Most people are now aware of coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but filoviruses and paramyxoviruses also have been known to cause lethal outbreaks as well. The Ebola virus is from the filovirus family, and diseases like measles and mumps are caused by paramyxoviruses.
Zoonotic diseases are very common in the U.S. and around the world, according to the CDC. Scientists estimate that three out of every four emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals. With the current study, researchers hope to collect more than 800,000 samples from wildlife. Once those are captured, they’ll analyze the samples to develop better methods of predicting when viruses are capable of causing diseases or outbreaks. (Lewiston Tribune)
