Preparedness is also made of vigilance towards new infectious threats. Professor Bert Niesters from the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, tells ASSET an example of spontaneous cooperation among 42 laboratories from more than 20 countries in Europe in facing an emerging, dangerous infection: enterovirus D68 respiratory epidemic in 2014-2015. That experience is now going on, taking the name of EUROTYPE.
Living poultry markets, common in China and in other eastern countries, are a typical example of how societal factors can be relevant in the spread of infectious diseases. A science-with-and-for-society approach should therefore find a way to solve this problem without fostering people hostility towards authorities. Even if central slaughters would be the simplest solutions, people would not accept them. Ivan Hung, Clinical Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant in the Department of Medicine at the Queen Mary Hospital of the University of Hong Kong, explains how this issue can be dealt with, in the fight against H7N9 bird flu virus and other new strains.
A debate is ongoing if Olympic Games should be cancelled, moved or delayed because of the Public Health Emergency of International Concern declared by WHO on 1st February 2016 on microcephaly in Brazil, which is being proven to be associated with Zika infection. On May 25th, 150 experts in bioethics, public health and social sciences signed an open letter to the WHO, asking to skip the Games, in order to avoid a further spread of the epidemic.
Albert Osterhaus, director of the Research Center for Emerging Infections and Zoonoses (RIZ) in Hannover, Germany, and Chairman of the European Working group on Influenza (ESW), is one of the top virologist in the world, who has discovered more than 50 new viruses over the last decades. In this short video he explains why the word “pandemic” can be a cause of misunderstanding between health authorities and the public, as it happened in 2009, when the new emerging flu virus A(H1N1) turned out to be milder than expected in the beginning.
Albert Osterhaus, director of the Research Center for Emerging Infections and Zoonoses (RIZ) in Hannover, Germany, is also a vet and a strong promoter of the One Health movement, which aims to consider animals and humans together, as possible sources and vectors of emerging diseases. In his lab MERS-Cov was discovered, which has caused thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths so far, mainly in the Middle East and in Korea. He has studied a new strategy to counteract this disease, vaccinating the dromedary camels, which are the main source of human infections.
“We are so close to ending the polio” and “Still 15 years to a polio-free world” are not contradictory statements. They instead describe, with different degree of optimism, the current framework and the objective to be pursued in the fight against this disease. In other words, we are closer than ever to the target of a world free of polio, but much remains to be done to carry the world across the threshold. Polio eradication is the next issue public health authorities will be committed to in midterm future.
During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) developed an application that allowed people to share information on the spread of the contagion, which proved to be very useful to monitor the situation. Now that the Zika virus outbreak is raising concerns, would it be possible to use a similar approach? Some weeks ago, the experts of the CDC argued that developing an app to track the spread of Zika virus would not be as effective as it was with Ebola.
Flutrackers is an online platform that gather information about infectious diseases from journals, news sources and citizens around the world. It was started in 2006 by a diverse group of volunteers, initially interested in investigating seasonal influenza, novel influenza, and chikungunya. In later years, we expanded our range by including other health threats such as the Ebola and Zika viruses, and drug resistant bacteria.
