Experts say future pandemic may be due to traffic jam or GARLIC –

Somewhere in the world, the next pandemic bug is quietly developing and is about to pass us by unnoticed, perhaps even faster and more deadly than Covid-19.

But where, when and how will this deadly pathogen appear? And what will happen? These are questions facing infectious disease scientists who are already certain of one thing: Covid is a harbinger of more global infections.

So the race began developing new early warning systems, looking for warning signs in everything from traffic jams and sewers to old museum exhibits and even garlic sales.

Earlier this month, the University of Oxford launched the new Pandemic Sciences Institute, a £100m initiative to build global preparedness for new infectious threats.

It brings together the university’s rich experience that has enabled Oxford scientists to launch the first human trials of the groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccine, four months after the first genome decoding of the pandemic virus was decoded in 2020. As the AstraZeneca vaccine, the vaccines were administered more than twice. billion doses delivered worldwide.

The responsibility will be to detect viral threats to develop new drugs and vaccines at maximum speed. But that means we need to identify new pandemic insects before they have a chance to emerge, said Christophe Fraser, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the new institute.

‘If Covid Can Be Controlled At The Beginning’ [when the first cases emerged in China]I think we would have avoided it,” he told Good Health.

This could be achieved, for example, by rapidly enforcing local blocks and bans on international travel as scientists worked to develop new vaccines and drugs.

The 2003 SARS epidemic, which started in China and resulted in nearly 8,000 cases in 26 countries, was curtailed by travel bans and congestion, which were brought faster than Covid.

“We know from testing that if the SARS virus had gotten out of control, it would have evolved to be more contagious,” says Professor Fraser.

Ebola was also a close call in 2014. But Nigeria had the virus, which caused the fatal bleeding, under control within two months.

“In 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome (or MERS) was a little easier to understand” [not least because it did not transmit easily from person to person]but this reduction was not inevitable,” he adds.

“We will experience more pandemics,” he warns, “but by getting early data on emerging pathogens we can reduce that number in the future so people can respond appropriately.”

Professor Fraser’s fears are widely supported, and the UK government says there is a 50% chance of another Covid-19 pandemic in the next 25 years.

Experts say the threat is heightened as large-scale human expansion into previously undisturbed habitats – forests, for example – puts us in closer contact with wildlife harboring previously unknown pathogens.

But what are the first basic clues for an emerging pandemic?

“We often see signs of a new epidemic before we see people getting sick,” said David Bray, director of the GeoTech Center, a US agency that advocates the use of technology to improve our lives.

As an example, he explains that 20 years ago, when they worked on global monitoring for US health officials, they noticed that the price of garlic in China – considered a panacea for diseases by some Asian cultures – had increased tenfold.

Professor Fraser’s fears are widely supported, and the UK government says there is a 50% chance of another Covid-19 pandemic in the next 25 years. Oxford Circus in London can be seen block above in April 2020

This increased demand caused a sudden rush to purchase herbal folk remedies to relieve rapidly emerging respiratory problems. “This was the first sign of SARS, a precursor to Covid,” says David Bray. “We saw it five months before China announced it was experiencing a new respiratory coronavirus outbreak.”

The same happened in early 2020, when garlic prices rose again in China, as the first sign of an increase in Covid-19.

And there were other early warning signs that were largely ignored at the time. Between August and December 2019, a few months before most of us heard of the virus, satellite images showed an increase in road traffic outside hospitals in Wuhan, China, where the virus originated.

A 67% increase in traffic was reported in a 2020 study by Harvard University scientists, which found that roads near five city hospitals are much busier than usual.

In retrospect, the trafficking footage was crucial as they suggest the virus had spread to the community three months before the first cases were confirmed by Chinese authorities in November 2019.

The same study showed an increase in online searches for information about symptoms such as “cough” and “diarrhea”, both of which are common symptoms of Covid, in China during the same period.

Meanwhile, scientists are searching for epidemiological gold in city sewers. Because when we are infected with pathogens, we flush them down the toilet. A national wastewater monitoring program will be set up to monitor for traces of Covid in the raw wastewater of around 40 million people in the UK in 2020.

It came after a pilot project in key cities such as Cardiff, Manchester and Liverpool matched local viral DNA levels in Covid-19 sewers with infection rates, meaning sewage testing could be a valuable flag for local outbreaks.

Now researchers want to use this approach as a warning system for emerging pandemics.

Susan De Long, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Colorado State University, reported in the journal Modern Sciences in May that wastewater entering treatment plants can be sampled for levels of viral DNA that will indicate whether there is a new threat of infection.

“Can provide early warning of public health measures” [such as mask wearing, vaccination and working from home] may be right,’ says De Long.

“If wastewater monitoring had been part of the consolidated public health infrastructure at the end of 2019, it could have provided an early warning that Covid-19 was becoming a global threat.”

Trends in social media can also help us detect pandemics early. When researchers from the University of Calabria in Italy analyzed social media since late 2019, they found growing concerns about pneumonia cases in Europe before the widespread identification of Covid-19.

Their research, published last year in Scientific Reports, focused on tweets about pneumonia as it was the most serious condition caused by Covid, and also the 2020 flu season was milder than normal, which should mean the number of cases. pneumonia reduced pneumonia.

Social media monitoring could be a way to monitor emerging pandemic signs, the scientists said.

Away from social media, another way to predict pandemics is being tested. Curators at the National Museum of History in London are uploading all their data on bat specimens and other potential animal sources of pandemic viruses into a global database for scientists.

Three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic and are transmitted from animals to humans. Examples include rabies in dogs; monkey HIV; and Covid-19, believed to have come from bats. The museum has already digitized more than 30,000 bat records and 6,000 more are in development. Monsters consist of preserved skins, skeletons and bodies. A similar study last year at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris revealed previously unidentified coronaviruses closely linked to the Covid-19 virus lurking in samples from two Rhinolophus Shamali bats found in Cambodia in 2010. Museum examples like this have already helped detect a mysterious epidemic of infectious disease in the United States in 1993 that claimed 13 deaths.

Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome kills about 40 percent of infected people by filling their lungs with fluid. Researchers at the University of New Mexico’s Southwestern Biology Museum analyzed the findings of hantavirus-infected mice and identified the rodents as the species from which the deadly strain originated.

Most importantly, the researchers were able to show that the virus has been circulating in local rodent populations for years and that its emergence in humans is linked to El Niño climate cycles.

These occur in significantly increased rainfall in the southwestern United States as ocean currents in the Pacific warm, and this is believed to bring virus-carrying creatures into closer contact with humans.

But Sir Peter Horby, director of Oxford University’s Pandemic Science Institute, is confident that frontline doctors will play a vital role in raising awareness of emerging viral threats.

Sir Peter says pandemic alarms often occur when a doctor sees a group of cases and finds it strange. If they hit the ‘red button’ and warn colleagues around the world, the new pathogen could be detected further.’

By using low-cost technology, for example, by offering doctors in poorer countries free apps to record data on new symptoms of the disease, the likelihood of this happening now can be increased. “The technology is there to do all that,” he says.