Environmental News Network - Before the Next Pandemic, an Ambitious Push to Catalog Viruses in Wildlife

Details: By YaleEnvironment 360; 24.Apr

As the world reels from a global viral wildfire costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, epidemiologists are turning their attention to how best to prevent the next pandemic.

Cheryl Porter

As the world reels from a global viral wildfire costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, epidemiologists are turning their attention to how best to prevent the next pandemic.

Many argue that the wisest use of limited global scientific and financial resources is to focus on surveillance, detection, and intensive study of new diseases as they spill over from the wild into humans. But one infectious disease expert has a more ambitious plan — to sample much of the world’s vast wildlife populations to identify the likely viral culprits that could spark the next pandemic.

It’s a daunting prospect. Scientists have identified only 4,000 of the estimated 1.67 million viruses thought to exist on earth. The goal of Dennis Carroll and his Global Virome Project is, over the next decade, to enlist an international network of scientists to eventually collect hundreds of thousands of those viruses and map their genomes. Carroll estimates the cost of the project at $1.2 billion.

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Before the Next Pandemic, an Ambitious Push to Catalog Viruses in Wildlife