Virus hunter aims to predict & prevent pandemics

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>> Nathan Wolfe: I'm Nathan Wolfe, and I'm the Director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.

Music My job is to try to work to understand how it is that new pandemics are born and ideally to help create systems and facilitate the movement of those systems to help prevent novel pandemics from taking hold. The Global Viral Forecasting Initiative started off with a site in Cameroon. Now, we've expanded into Congo, China, and Malaysia, with some work in other sites. But as this sort of network expands, the idea is that you could actually catch these things as they emerge. So, for example, whether it be in Mexico for H1N1, whether it be a virus that emerges in Gabon, which is Ebola virus, or Lassa fever virus in Sierra Leone, what we want to do is place ourselves at the portal of entry so that we can catch the moment at which new viruses cross from animals into human populations. HIV, I think, is probably a perfect example of this from our perspective. We started seeing the disease consequences of it globally in 1981, and we discovered the virus in about 1984. But this is a virus that clearly was circulating in human populations probably in the early part of the 20th century, so we really missed the boat. It was interesting for us that the origin of malaria was still a mystery. What we determined definitively was this was actually a parasite of chimpanzees, which jumped over into human populations. And we don't know exactly when that occurred, but almost certainly, it was probably one infected mosquito that seeded this particular parasite into human populations. A parasite that later had absolutely devastating consequences and continues to devastate human populations throughout the world. What we want to do is pick through all those different viruses and find the characteristics of those likely to be devastating so that we can raise the alarm bells early and catch them before they become truly devastating. If you trace this out 10, 20 years into the future, what we need to do is capture one pandemic and notify individuals early about the spread of this disease, and the economic consequences would be so substantial that they would pay for activities 20 or 30 times over.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====