The world is at greater risk of a pandemic now than before COVID, experts say. This is why

The world is at greater risk of a pandemic now than before COVID, experts say. This is why

As global health leaders confront deadly outbreaks of hantavirus and Ebola, a major report on pandemic preparedness finds we are less safe from viral outbreaks than before COVID.

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanne Brner

The world today is more at risk of pandemics and less safe from deadly viral outbreaks than before. COVIDa major preparation for a pandemic report find.

“The evidence is clear: the health, economic, social and political impacts of health emergencies have not diminished and are increasing in important areas,” write the report’s authors. “In short, reforms have not kept pace with the growing pandemic risk: the world is not yet truly safer. »

The report is the final analysis by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, a World Health Organization (WHO) group created in the wake of the 2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak to assess how prepared countries were to deal with a deadly pandemic. The report, first published in 2019, has since provided an annual overview of pandemic preparedness – and the world is heading in the wrong direction, the authors concluded.

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On May 17, the WHO declared a state of global health emergency following an outbreak of a type of Ebola virus in Africa that has killed dozens of people and sickened hundreds more; Meanwhile, the organization and national health agencies are trying to contain a deadly outbreak. hantavirus outbreak this killed three people who were on the cruise ship where the spread began.

“Global health security faces a convergence of threats that put the world at greater risk than before from a devastating global pandemic,” says Jessica Justman, an epidemiologist and senior technical director of ICAP at Columbia University, a research center focused on global health emergencies and pandemics. The Ebola and hantavirus epidemics show that “infectious disease epidemics have not disappeared.”

The report’s authors highlight several reasons for these growing risks: they include a lack of public trust in health institutions, the increased threat of climate change and armed conflict, geopolitical fragmentation, lack of funding for health initiatives, weakened access to medical treatments, and personal commercial interests. On the latter point, the authors note the potential for artificial intelligence to transform pandemic preparedness, but they say that without guidance it will likely exacerbate health risks.

“The threats are vast,” says Justman, who was not involved in the report. Many national governments are not adequately funding public health infrastructure, while the scale of global health threats has expanded to include risks from AI, war, accelerating climate change and antimicrobial resistance, she says.

The report warns that the future will be marked by increasingly frequent pandemics and public health emergencies, which will be more difficult to manage and more disruptive than COVID.

“The world risks entering a cycle of accelerating health crises, where each new shock further erodes resilience and widens existing divides,” the authors write.

“To change course, global health security must be a financial priority in national budgets, particularly in countries that have the resources to do so,” says Justman. However, it remains to be seen whether the political will exists: in the United States, the Trump administration cut funding for research into infectious diseases such as COVID, while also cutting support for global health initiatives by dismantling organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

The administration also withdrew the United States from the WHO, removing the world’s largest health sector financier and removing crucial support for responding to emerging pandemic threats. At the same time, the WHO has been struggling for months to finalize its own Pandemic Accord, a treaty aimed at improving international preparedness and response to a pandemic in the wake of COVID – the question is how countries are supposed to share information about emerging pathogens with each other.

This disagreement could be symptomatic of what the report’s authors see as a vast “democratic erosion” following successive pandemics and health emergencies over the past decade. Trust is essential to pandemic preparedness – and it is in steep decline.

“These pressures make the world not only more likely to face epidemics and pandemics in the future, but also more vulnerable to their cascading impacts,” the authors write.