New team to tackle viral spillover for pandemic prevention

As global health experts and governments continue to focus on containing pathogens after they have already made the jump from animals to humans, a new commission is looking to shift the emphasis to preventing those spillovers from even happening.

Prevention has “received very short shrift,” said Nigel Sizer, who will serve on The Lancet commission on prevention of viral spillover. He added that this has happened particularly, and ironically, in the world of public health, where almost all the resources are spent on treatment, post-outbreak management, containment, and vaccines.

“Those are very important, but there’s a massive imbalance between what’s being spent post-outbreak once there’s already a crisis, and what’s being spent to try to prevent that from happening in the first place, which would have the most equitable outcome,” he told Devex.