A global network of doctors and laboratories is working to identify emerging viral threats, including those caused by climate change, in an effort to prevent the next pandemic.
A coalition of self-described “virus hunters” has uncovered viral threats ranging from an unusual tick-borne disease in Thailand to a sudden outbreak in Colombia of a mosquito-borne infection.
“The list of things we need to worry about, as we saw with Covid-19, is not set in stone,” said Gavin Cloherty, an infectious disease expert who heads the Abbott Alliance to Protect Against Pandemics.
“We have to be very vigilant about how known harmful elements change… but we also have to be alert to the possibility of new elements emerging,” he told AFP.
The alliance brings together doctors and scientists at universities and health institutions around the world with funding from healthcare and medical device giant Abbott.
By uncovering new threats, the alliance gives Abbott a potential advantage in designing new types of testing tools that have been essential in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This commitment gives the Alliance the ability to detect, sequence, and respond to new viruses.
“When we detect something, we can very quickly roll out diagnostic tests at an industry level,” Cloherty said, adding that “the idea is to protect against outbreaks, so we can prevent a pandemic.”
The coalition has sequenced nearly 13,000 samples since it began work in 2021.
In Colombia, the coalition has detected an outbreak of oropouche, a virus spread by mosquitoes that has rarely been seen there before.
Evolutionary work to trace the lineage of this virus has revealed that it came from Peru or Ecuador, not Brazil, another hotspot for viral spread.
“You can see where things are going,” Cloherty explained. “It’s important from a public health perspective.”
difficult and expensive
Recently, the alliance, in collaboration with doctors in Thailand, revealed that a tick-borne virus was behind a mysterious cluster of illnesses.
“At that time, we did not know what virus caused this syndrome,” explained Pakpom Phompoong, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at Siriraj Hospital.
Testing and sequencing of samples dating back to 2014 showed that a significant number of them had severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTSV).
“Less than 10 patients have been diagnosed with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TPS) in Thailand… We do not have PCR diagnosis, nor do we have serum data to diagnose this viral infection,” Pakpom told AFP.
He pointed out that diagnosing these cases is “difficult and requires intensive effort, and it is also expensive.”
There is an increasing need to track these threats as the range of infectious diseases expands globally due to climate change.
There is a well-established and multifaceted link between climate change and infectious diseases.
Warmer climate conditions allow vectors, such as mosquitoes, to live in new places, while increased precipitation creates more breeding grounds, and extreme weather forces people outdoors where they are more vulnerable to mosquito bites.
Human impact on the planet also drives the spread and evolution of infectious diseases in other ways. Loss of biodiversity forces viruses to evolve into new hosts, and can push animals into close contact with humans.
Vigilance
The evolutionary analysis of the Thai thrombocytopenia syndrome strain provides an overview of the complex interplay in this topic.
The analysis showed that the virus evolved from being carried by a tick with a smaller geographic range to being transmitted by the harder Asian longhorned tick.
The analysis indicated that the evolution of the virus was largely driven by the use of insecticides that reduced the numbers of the ticks’ original host sites.
Once the virus evolves, it could spread further, in part because Asian longhorned ticks can live on birds, which travel longer distances and more quickly due to changing climate conditions.
These media are “like airlines,” Cloherty said.
Climate change’s fingerprints are everywhere, from dengue fever outbreaks in Latin America and the Caribbean to the spread of West Nile virus in the United States.
While the alliance grew out of collaborations that predated the pandemic, the global spread of COVID-19 has provided a stark reminder of the risks of infectious diseases.
But Cloherty fears people have already forgotten these lessons.
“We have to be vigilant,” he said, “because something that happens in Bangkok could happen in Boston tomorrow.”