COVID-19 has taken a huge toll on the world, claiming more than 5 million lives and costing trillions of dollars in economic losses. Though it’s been an extreme global event, it’s not the first zoonotic disease that’s had massive effects on humanity. Over the past century, the number of lives lost and the economic damages of emerging zoonotic diseases, which transfer from animals (often wild, sometimes livestock) to humans, have been steadily increasing. And experts say there are likely to be even more in the future.
Society has mostly dealt with these diseases after they’ve made the jump from animals to humans, focusing on interventions like testing, vaccines, and pharmaceuticals. But what if the focus was on preventing those diseases from spilling over into human populations in the first place? Tactics like reducing deforestation, better managing the wildlife trade, and global surveillance of pathogens could help do so—and while it would be expensive, it would cost less than 1/20th the value of those lives lost and economic costs incurred each year from those diseases.
That figure comes from a paper published in Science Advances, authored by 20 researchers who are urging policy makers to focus on preventing zoonotic pandemics, rather than contain diseases after they emerge. “We want to say, look, what we’ve learned from COVID has been an awfully bitter lesson, and the lesson is that even with all our resources, all our medical science, the cures aren’t working well enough,” says Stuart Pimm, chair of conservation ecology at Duke University, whose work focuses on biodiversity and species loss, and one of the c0authors. “We’ve got to get involved in prevention.”
To calculate the cost of these pandemics, the researchers looked at every novel zoonotic disease that has killed at least 10 people since the Spanish Flu, including HIV, West Nile, SARS, and H1N1 (pathogens that affected livestock or crops weren’t included). Researchers assigned a value to every life lost, which ranges depending on the country, and calculated the economic losses of these diseases in terms of their effect on gross national income.
Every year, on the low estimate, the world loses about $320 billion in terms of lives lost and about $200 billion in economic slowdowns due to emerging zoonotic diseases. The cost to take preventative actions that would limit the spillover of these diseases to humans in the first place, the researchers say, would be about $20 billion. The calculations the researchers did on the costs of dealing with these diseases are also limited; they couldn’t exactly quantify, they write, the psychological impact of COVID-19, or the costs of people who had to defer medical care during the pandemic, or the medical costs associated with dealing with these diseases years later.
“The things we’re suggesting are really straightforward things. We need to know what’s out there, we need to strongly suppress bringing wild animals in captivity to eat them . . . we need to suppress trade in live animals, of wild animals that are not checked for diseases,” Pimm says. “All of these are obvious, prudent, sensible things; where what’s needed is some political will, or really an extraordinarily small amount of money to get things back into a safer world.”
Another step includes surveilling pathogens by mapping out where the world’s concentrations of species likely to cause spillover diseases live, and having a shared database of the pathogens they’re carrying. Other preventative actions would have broader benefits, too. Ending deforestation would allow wild animals more habitat space and keep them from living so close to cities; besides, tropical deforestation accounts for 10% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Slowing it is essential to preventing pandemics—deforestation is “arguably the leading driver of pathogen emergence,” the researchers write, and reducing it would also help us meet our climate goals.
And while prevention has broad positive effects, reacting to each emerging zoonotic disease has limited benefits. The COVID-19 vaccine was a medical feat, but there’s no guarantee the next one will be able to be developed so quickly. By contrast, preventing diseases from spilling over could stop not only one disease, but all of them.
“We’re going to get a stream of these zoonotic diseases that are going to spill into our population,” says Pimm. “The numbers and severity are increasing. This may not be the last one, which is frightening. And the changes that we propose are very simple, very straightforward, and they have lots of other benefits, too.”
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