Whatever else about 2020’s pandemic and its devastating impact on lives and livelihoods, it was not unpredicted. A flu-like pandemic has been at or near the top of risk assessments by UK governments and the World Bank for years.
As recently as October 2019, only the US was judged to be better prepared for a biological threat to health – the UK was ranked second by the Global Health Security Index. Yet no country was fully prepared for a pandemic, and it warned: “political will for accelerating health security is caught in a perpetual cycle of panic and neglect”.
One question being asked is whether Covid-19 is zoonotic. That means to say, is Covid-19 an infection that is naturally transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans? Strictly speaking, because the virus has not, at the time of writing, been traced to an animal reservoir, some scientists argue that this classification is premature. Instead Covid-19 should be referred to as “an emerging infectious disease of probable animal origin”.
Download this whitepaper to gain a fascinating insight into the increasingly clear and present danger from zoonoses, laid bare by this pandemic.
What’s inside
- The known, the neglected, and the unknowns
- The growing dangers and drivers of zoonoses
- The untenable costs of containment
- The ‘one health’ approach
- The search for more intelligent solutions
- The environmental dimension
- A ‘one planet’ approach
