Timothée Poisot
Credit: Amélie Philibert, Université de Montréal
It's all connected: coronaviruses and other emerging infectious diseases, loss of biodiversity, and destruction of the environment by humans. Around the world, pathogens and parasites are responding to the changes in unexpected ways, fueling the rise of pandemics and the extinction of countless plant and animal species.
But all is not lost. To stave off disaster, scientists must focus on monitoring and limiting the spread of a handful of high-risk viruses, especially on farms and in live-animal markets, and governments must step up efforts to track pathogens, protect wildlife and strengthen public-health systems, Canadian and American experts argue in a new paper.
Led by computational ecologist Timothée Poisot, an associate professor of biology at Université de Montréal, and Colin J. Carlson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University's School of Public Health, the research by scientists in Canada, the United Kingdom, U.S. and China is published today in the inaugural issue of Nature Reviews in Biodiversity.
As well as providing an overview of current science, the scientists offer a historical perspective on global pandemics and the spillover events (viral, bacterial and others) that have occurred since 1960. They then make several recommendations, particularly on preventing future pandemics, and more broadly on improving surveillance techniques in public health.
We asked Poisot, whose co-authors include Cole Brookson, a member of Carlson's lab and guest researcher in Poisot's lab at UdeM, to tell us more about the report and its implication for future policy.
First of all, how comprehensive is this study - and is it a first?
Ecologists have been trying to understand how biodiversity and disease are related for well over a century now, so it is difficult to claim to be the first. But we have tried to make this study very comprehensive. The COVID-19 pandemic has led many ecologists to think about infectious disease, and we wanted to provide a strong, contemporary roadmap to the state of knowledge. One thing we bring with this article is a strong emphasis on action and solutions: how can we use initiatives like the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, or the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, as a scaffold to think about efficient management of infectious-disease risk? This is one of my favourite outcomes of this study: not only can we provide a good overview of current knowledge, we can also identify work to do on policy and governance. It's a very action-oriented review of the scientific literature.
How data-driven are your efforts?
We re-analyzed a lot of existing data, both to provide a clear historical picture of where pandemics started, where we had observed more reports of infectious-disease emergence, and where we know we are still far from a clear picture of viral diversity. For example, we don't know which viruses can infect the vast majority of aquatic mammals in the Southern hemisphere. More than 1,500 species of rodents, and about 1,000 species of bats, have no documented viruses at all. This is important information for biodiversity scientists: there is a whole world of viral diversity that needs to be documented urgently, and this work will have tangible benefits for disease prevention.
