How do you prevent future pandemics?

Pangolin meat (c) JB Dodane

World Health Day is a global health awareness day which marks the founding of the World Health Organisation on 7 April 1948. Each year, World Health Day draws attention to a specific health topic, which affects the health of people all over the world.

Dr Mark Jones

Today kicks off a year-long ‘Healthy beginnings, hopeful futures’ campaign, focussing on maternal and newborn health, and prioritising women’s long-term well-being. This year’s World Health Day has a particular poignancy, as our Head of Policy, veterinarian Dr Mark Jones, reports.  

World Health Day 2025 happens to fall on the first day of a final round of important negotiations between governments aimed at securing a legally binding global agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. The process, conducted under the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) watchful eye, was initiated in December 2021 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

A draft agreement is to be presented to the World Health Assembly in Geneva this May, for adoption by the WHO’s 192 member governments. This agreement was intended for presentation in 2024, but disagreements and political differences have resulted in long delays.

The forgotten pandemic?

Have many of the government officials negotiating the agreement forgotten the devastating impacts of Covid-19? According to official WHO figures, the pandemic directly affected more than 777 million people. More than seven million are reported to have died, and countless others suffer long-term physical and mental health impacts. The cost to the global economy runs into trillions of pounds. The true figures are likely much higher.

The original source of Covid-19 has not been definitively established. Most scientists believe the virus originated in wild animals being held and sold in street markets. Others point to a leak from a laboratory where experiments on viruses from animals were being conducted. These viruses can pass through wild or domestic animal hosts, then jump to people.  Coronaviruses are found throughout nature and have been of special concern to public health professionals for decades as they cause respiratory illness in humans.  In other species, they may present as mild illness, but the types of animals that pose the biggest threat to humans in terms of pandemic risk are bats, rodents and non-human primates. If a coronavirus from another species spills over into humans an epidemic in the human population can occur, as with COVID-19.

The wild animal market theory would fit with the widely referenced evidence that around 60% of emerging infectious diseases in humans are derived from animals (zoonoses). Most of those originated in wildlife. However, this only because we disrupt and stress wild animals by:

• Disturbing and destroying their habitats
• Hunting and farming them
• Transporting and trading them
• Mixing them with other species they wouldn’t normally encounter
• Bringing animals into close contact with people

Risky human behaviours such as these allow viruses and other pathogens to emerge, proliferate, mutate, spill over, and potentially affect us. Intensively farmed domestic animals can also act as a source of or conduit for potentially zoonotic pathogens.

Human health is directly linked to the health of other species

A wildlife market (c) Bernd Dittrich, Unsplash

There may be tens if not hundreds of thousands of as yet undiscovered viruses in wild animals that have the potential to jump across to humans and other animals.

This highlights just how closely our own health is tied to that of the other species with whom we share our world, and indeed the wider environment on which we all depend. This also highlights that  these risks lie not with the animals themselves, but in the way we interact with and treat them.

This is why Born Free has been working alongside other organisations focussed on wildlife protection and animal welfare. We are emphasising the need for the government officials, negotiating the pandemics agreement, to focus on strong measures aimed at preventing future pandemics. Human activities that are greatly increasing the emergence and impact pathogens must be addressed.

What drives pandemic risk?

A recent landmark report by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) explored the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health. This report identified land – and sea-use change, as well as the unsustainable exploitation of wildlife, as the most important direct drivers of both biodiversity loss and infectious disease emergence.

Born Free is also pushing hard to ensure governments are committed through the pandemic agreement to adopt and implement a One Health approach to pandemic risk. One Health recognises the interconnection between human, animal and environmental health.

The approach stresses the importance of those involved in human health, animal health and environmental protection working closely together to design and implement research, policies and interventions that recognise and incorporate interconnectivity.

An integrated, unified approach

One Health is the intuitive concept that all life is connected. This concept has existed throughout human history across different cultures but it is only in the late 1990’s through the wildlife veterinary community that the modern idea of One Health came into being. The One Health approach was developed as a response to the fragmentation and specialization of modern science and medicine and the loss of a holistic concept of medicine. Over the years, the One Health concept has been described in many different ways by people with varying interests and expertise.

However, in 2021, a definition of One Health was developed by a panel of experts, and adopted by the WHO, the World Organisation for Animal Health, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the United Nations Environment Programme.

This definition recognises that ‘The health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and inter-dependent…’., and the need to ‘…mobilise multiple sectors, disciplines and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems…’  

This definition empowers governments and society to recognise the urgent need to transform our relationship with the natural world, for its own sake and for the sake of our own health and future.

Preventing future pandemics?

The current draft pandemic agreement emphasises the need to identify and address the drivers of infectious disease at the ‘human-animal-environment interface’ to prevent future pandemics, and incorporates the need for governments to adopt and implement a One Health approach.

The agreement would also benefit from the addition of specific actions governments must take, and greater recognition that many developing countries will need help, in the form of both technical and financial resources, to effectively implement these actions.

The language in the agreement is still to be finalised and could fall foul of further political wrangling.

Born Free will continue to advocate relentlessly for the protection of nature and wildlife. Real improvements in the ways we treat both wild and domestic animals must be made, as central tenets to preventing further pandemics.

Only by taking better care of our planet, and the diverse life that calls the Earth home, can we give generations to come the healthy beginnings and hopeful futures they deserve.