ETech Preview: On The Front Lines of the Next Pandemic

by James Turner | comments: 0

With all of the stress and anxiety that humanity deals with on a daily basis--confronting the dangers of global warming, the perils of a financial system in meltdown and the ever-present threat of terrorism--the fact that there's yet another danger lurking out there ready to destroy mankind: the threat of a global pandemic, may be easy to forget. But although you and I may have driven thoughts of Ebola and the like from our minds, Dr. Nathan Wolfe worries about them every day. Dr. Wolfe founded and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative which monitors the transfer of new diseases from animals to humans.

He received his Bachelor's degree at Stanford in 1993 and his Doctorate in Immunology and Infectious Diseases from Harvard in 1998. Dr. Wolfe was awarded the National Institute of Health International Research Scientist Development Award in 1999 and a prestigious NIH Directors Pioneer Award in 2005. He'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March. His session is entitled, "Viral Forecasting." Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Nathan Wolfe: My pleasure.

James Turner: So why don't we start by talking about the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. How is it different from the work that the CDC and the WHO and similar organizations do monitoring disease spread?

NW: Well, what we do is we actually focus on the interface between humans and animal populations. When we looked back and investigated the ways in which disease got started, the ways that pandemics really originated, what we found is that really the vast majority of these things are animal diseases. So rather than monitoring for illness, at which point it could potentially be too late, we've taken it one step backward. We actually focus on people who have high levels of contact with animals. And we set up large groups of these individuals and monitor the diseases that they have, as well as the diseases in the animal population. So the idea is to be able to catch these things a little bit earlier.

JT: The last disease that really made a big splash with the media was Ebola, earlier in this decade. But we really haven't heard much recently. Have things calmed down as far as new and novel diseases? Or are we just hearing less about outbreaks these days?

NW: Well, I mean I think we've had really substantive important pandemics. If you take a look at SARS, for example. SARS really only infected about 1,200 individuals, but its impact was tremendous. It was billions of dollars of economic impact all throughout the world. Even in a place like Singapore, where you had a small number of cases, you had an incredibly substantive financial impact. And then, of course, right now we have H5N1 which is -- they call it the bird flu. Actually, most influenzas are bird influenzas, so it's a little bit of a misnomer. But H5N1 is a virus which is spreading around the world in birds. And if it does make a transition into humans, which some bird flu will over the next 20 to 30 years, it could be incredibly devastating. So I think that these are kind of constant and present dangers. They're things that are increasing over time simply because of the way that we're connected as a human population.

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