Pandemic preventionThe (Low) Cost of Preventing the next pandemic

Thus far, COVID has cost at least $2.6 trillion and may cost ten times this amount. It is the largest global pandemic in 100 years. Six months after emerging, it has killed over 600,000 people and is having a major impact on the global economy.

“How much would it cost to prevent this happening again? And what are the principal actions that need to be put in place to achieve this?” asked Andrew Dobson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. He and colleague Stuart Pimm of Duke University assembled a team to seek answers.

Their team has now written a Policy Forum article — a research-based opinion piece — for the journal Science. In it, the multidisciplinary group of epidemiologists, wildlife disease biologists, conservation practitioners, ecologists and economists argue that an annual investment of $30 billion would pay for itself quickly.

“There have been at least four other viral pathogens that have emerged in the human population so far this century. Investment in prevention may well be the best insurance policy for human health and the global economy in the future,” Pimm said.

Two major factors loom large as drivers of emerging pathogens: destruction of tropical forests and the wildlife trade. Each has contributed two of the four emerging diseases that have appeared in the last 50 years: COVID, Ebola, SARS, HIV.

Both deforestation and the wildlife trade also cause widespread damage to the environment on multiple fronts, so there are diverse benefits associated with reducing them, note the researchers. Increased monitoring and policing of these activities would allow future emerging viruses to be detected at a much earlier stage, when control could prevent further spread.

All the credible genetic evidence points to COVID-19 emerging from a bat species traded as food in China. The wildlife trade is a major component of the global economy, with principal economic products including food, medicine, pets, clothing and furniture. Some of these are traded as luxury goods, which can create an intimate association that enhances the risk of pathogen transmission to the merchant or the buyer. Wildlife markets are invariably poorly regulated and unsanitary.

The organization tasked with monitoring international wildlife trade — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) — has a net global budget of “a mere $6 million,” said Dobson. “Many of the 183 signatories are several years in arrears in their payments.”