There’s a new report providing recommendations on how to prevent the next pandemic. But unlike others, this one focuses on preventing the spillover of virus pathogens from animals to humans — and the investments needed to make that happen.
The report, published by the Harvard-led International Scientific Task Force to Prevent Pandemics at the Source, identifies potential sources of viruses that could infect humans. Bats, for instance, are known “reservoirs” for a number of viral human diseases, such as coronaviruses e.g., SARS, and filoviruses e.g., Ebola.
It also tackles the question of where the next pandemic may emerge and the different modeling approaches being used to predict that — which can sometimes produce very different answers.