Veterinarians, farmers, and zookeepers could help prevent the next pandemic, but their expertise has been overlooked.
Recognition of the link between humans and other animals for Covid-19 is driving the push to ban China’s live animal markets, which pose a high risk for contagion. And animal health expertise could help prevent outbreaks in other ways, some scientists say. For example, greater animal surveillance could detect new diseases earlier and stop them from being passed to humans. And techniques for controlling outbreaks in livestock, such as randomized surveillance strategies, could also improve efforts to limit the spread of disease in human populations.
Yet despite being recognized as useful, the field of animal health has long been siloed away from human medicine. Veterinarians as well as wildlife biologists, livestock farmers, and zookeepers remain a largely untapped resource for combatting diseases that threaten people. “There is still a very traditional divide among disciplines,” said Jon Epstein, a wildlife veterinarian and disease ecologist for the EcoHealth Alliance in New York. “We haven’t removed these barriers yet.”
That’s not to say that experts haven’t been trying. But progress in getting authorities to see the connectedness of human and animal health has been slow — and in some instances in recent decades, has even gone backwards.
"It’s time that we stopped using humans as sentinels of animal diseases,” said Joe Annelli, the executive vice president of the National Association of Federal Veterinarians and formerly with the USDA. Instead, he said, we should be aiming to identify diseases in other animals as early as possible, when there’s still a chance of preventing them from spreading to humans.
This was a really interesting article to read! Another area of concern that Covid-19 is bringing into a bigger spotlight right now, like previous zoonotic epidemics. And hopefully with the extent of the current crisis, it means there will be more work done towards to monitor animal health and human health as a connected unit more closely. We're just too intertwined at this point to keep ignoring this kind of thing.
