Private foundations and academic institutions have combined reports of strange new infections in hospitals around the world, coordinated airline and ship routes and schedules, combined with other relevant medical information, to track infections as they spread. It’s still not a global effort. It is clear that between climate change and zoonotic viral transmission, nature is hell-bent on culling the herd. A population that seems to be over double what the earth can, optimally, sustain.
It is difficult enough, in environmentally competitive times, to deal with the hard facts behind climate change and rising pandemic risk with realistic and effective scientific responses. Backlash at governments failing to provide what many believe are necessary and credible responses has also generated socio-political trends that make applying fact-based solutions difficult. It’s always been this way. “Since ancient times, pandemics have spurred sharp turns in political beliefs, spawning extremist movements, waves of mistrust and wholesale rejection of authorities. Nearly a year into the coronavirus crisis, Americans are falling prey to the same phenomenon, historians, theologians and other experts say, exemplified by a recent NPR-Ipsos poll in which nearly 1 in 5 said they believe Satan-worshipping, child-enslaving elites seek to control the world.” Washington Post, February 15th. Much of what a government needs to do is now thwarted by mythology and desire to use that mythology to contain the government itself.
But what is clear to those educated individuals who accept scientific facts, especially when it comes to pandemics, that early-stage data – constant monitoring of blood tests on an aggregated global basis tied to geological reality – needs to be collected, tracked and reported on a near real time basis. Details of infectious agents, immune responses, perhaps even a central repository of relevant blood samples, just might be the path to containing future outbreaks early enough to avoid pandemics. Veronique Greenwood, writing for the February 15th New York Times, explains one possible immune-response-based program proposed by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health epidemiologist, Dr. Michael Mina:
“Back in the summer, Dr. Michael Mina made a deal with a cold storage company. With many of its restaurant clients closed down, the firm had freezers to spare. And Dr. Mina… had a half-million vials of plasma from human blood coming to his lab from across the country, samples dating back to the carefree days of January 2020.
“The vials, now in three hulking freezers outside Dr. Mina’s lab, are at the center of a pilot project for what he and his collaborators call the Global Immunological Observatory. They envision an immense surveillance system that can check blood from all over the world for the presence of antibodies to hundreds of viruses at once. That way, when the next pandemic washes over us, scientists will have detailed, real-time information on how many people have been infected by the virus and how their bodies responded.
“It might even offer some early notice, like a tornado warning. Although this monitoring system will not be able to detect new viruses or variants directly, it could show when large numbers of people start acquiring immunity to a particular kind of virus.
“The human immune system keeps a record of pathogens it has met before, in the form of antibodies that fight against them and then stick around for life. By testing for these antibodies, scientists can get a snapshot of which flu viruses you have had, what that rhinovirus was that breezed through you last fall, even whether you had a respiratory syncytial virus as a child. Even if an infection never made you sick, it would still be picked up by this diagnostic method, called serological testing… ‘We’re all like little recorders,’ keeping track of viruses without realizing it, Dr. Mina said.
“This type of readout from the immune system is different from a test that looks for an active viral infection. The immune system starts to produce antibodies one to two weeks after an infection begins, so serology is retrospective, looking back at what you have caught. Also, closely related viruses may produce similar responses, provoking antibodies that bind to the same kinds of viral proteins. That means carefully designed assays are needed to distinguish between different coronaviruses, for example.
“But serology uncovers things that virus testing does not, said Derek Cummings, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida. With a large database of samples and clinical details, scientists can begin to see patterns emerge in how the immune system responds in someone with no symptoms compared to someone struggling to clear the virus. Serology can also reveal before an outbreak starts whether a population has robust immunity to a given virus, or if it is dangerously low… ‘You want to understand what has happened in a population, and how prepared that population is for future attacks of a particular pathogen,’ Dr. Cummings said.
“The approach could also detect events in the viral ecosystem that otherwise go unnoticed, Dr. Cummings said. For example, the 2015 Zika outbreak was detected by doctors in Brazil who noticed a cluster of babies with abnormally small heads, born seven to nine months after their mothers were infected. ‘A serological observatory could conceivably have picked this up before then,’ he said… Serological surveys are often small and difficult to set up, since they require drawing blood from volunteers. But for several years Dr. Mina and his colleagues have been discussing the idea of a large and automated surveillance system using leftover samples from routine lab tests.”
This is hardly an inexpensive process, requires genuine transparency without political filters or agendas on an unprecedented global scale. With the coronavirus pandemic attacking 219 nations and territories, killing approximately two and a half million people and infecting over 110 million victims, whatever the cost and whatever the complexity, setting up an apolitical global system to implement this early-stage tracking has to be vastly less expensive and less cumbersome that sitting back to let another pandemic explode before we know it’s happening. Now is the time to implement new systems to prevent what the world is experiencing now.
I’m Peter Dekom, and this seems more like an ounce of prevention as opposed to gigatons of death and destruction once a pandemic gets out of hand.
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