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Maryn McKenna
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On Wednesday, an organization of scientists gathered – virtually, of course – to focus their studies on a video call. At this point in the Covid-19 pandemic, this was quite normal, which was nothing normal: the organization was launching a foreign campaign. network to stumble upon pathogens that can pass from wildlife to the human population, a research box that has been politicized since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and they did so with federal money, even though the US administration was behind politicization.
The network, known as CREID (for the Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Centers), announced 3 weeks ago through the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. NIH is investing $ 17 million this year and $ 82 million in five years to create 11 study nodes, most commonly at US universities, which will generate study partnerships in 28 other countries, adding China, where the existing pandemic began.
It is an investment, perhaps even a discreet change of meaning, for an administration that has spent more than nine months wondering the origins of the coronavirus and demonizing the country where other people were first affected, claiming malicious secrecy, laboratory forgetting and malice. Scientists who will run the centres must make sure they don’t look too closely at this paradox, choosing to focus on the network’s promise: if all goes well, you may just identify a global surveillance design that detects the next pandemic pathogen before it jumps humans. of the wild world.
That would be smart. Since the first foreign outbreak of a new coronavirus, SARS, in 2003, each and every overflow of a wildlife pathogen to humans, adding the H1N1 avian influenza outbreak in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in West Africa in 2014 and Zika in South America. in 2016 – a surprise This network can just break that pattern.
“We’ve all learned the hard way that every time there’s an emergency, it triggers a kind of disorganized interference,” says Nikos Vasilakis, a professor of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, who leads one of the new centers. “This gives us the option of a coordinated response, an option to create a network of strategically and geographically dispersed sites that would prevent you from the onset of any disease, regardless of its onset.
There are 11 means (10 study nodes and an operational and knowledge center at Duke University, compared to the 3 envisaged in the first place) to determine the scope of science needed to find, identify, perceive and potentially pathogenic in the process. jump to humans. This requires running in various disciplines to perceive how a pathogen lives in a host animal, what characteristics can cause infection in humans, how the human immune formula reacts, and what tests and remedies can evolve to trip and block fatal organisms. .
This also requires the progression of the ability to study in various places, from which the population extends to both sides of the wild world and discloses hunters and farmers to new pathogens, villages where human-to-human transmission begins, and urban spaces where adapted pathogens can be located enough. pathogens to cause explosive outbreaks. Working in this way requires local collaborators, that these collaborators anchor paintings in other countries, preventing studies from being extractive and ensuring that economic advantages will be gained by emerging countries where viruses spread as much as industrialized ones where viruses can simply spread.
The Vasilakis Research Center has been called CREATE-NEO, short for coordination studies on emerging arboviral threats spanning neotropics (many new centers have strangely developed acronyms). It will focus on viruses in Central and South America that are transmitted through mosquitoes and ticks; come with primary killers like yellow fever and Zika. mosquito-borne viruses in forests and the detection of how mosquito populations moved and transported the virus with them.
To make their new paintings at CREID, they recruited several partners: 3 institutes in Panama and Brazil, and in the United States, MIT and the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in New York State. Lead co-researcher Katherine Hanley is a professor of viral evolutionary ecology at New Mexico State University.
This geographical area is typical of the new project, in which 10 American fellows and one in Paris create their own mini-networks internationally, for example, the Center for Research on Emerging Infectious Diseases – Central and Eastern Africa (CREID-ECA) in Washington. State University participates with Emory University in Atlanta and institutes in Germany, Belgium, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The United World Antiviral Research Network at the University of Washington (the acronym is, yes, UWARN) works with universities in Brazil, Senegal, South Africa, Pakistan and Taipei.
It is attractive to see the American leadership making this investment, given that the Trump White House has not been interested at this level in making plans for a pandemic or in foreign cooperation. Consider that last year, the White House made adjustments to the body of workers who led to the dissolution. of the “pandemic unit” of the National Security Council, officially the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefensa. And last fall, management ended long-term investment for a pioneering task called Predict that detects viruses in the human-wild interface, which the U. S. Agency for International Development has been supporting for 10 years (in March, USAID gave Predict a six-month emergency extension, which now expires this month).
In addition to the pandemic, the administration attempted to blame China for the coronavirus as a lever in its ongoing industrial war, claiming on several occasions that the pathogen had been manufactured there or happened herbal, but that it had escaped in a laboratory accident. the term “Chinese virus,” and just two weeks ago, Mississippi’s Republican governor insisted, first on a Facebook and Twitter post, that the virus was not of herbal origin, writing, “The Chinese Communist Party will have to acknowledge the fact that they triggered this virus and lied about it.
Only one of the new centers will be operating in China. The Center for Research in Epidemiology, Surveillance and Pathogenesis of Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID-ESP) at the University of Washington at St. Louis plans to marry the University of Hong Kong and the CDC of China, as well as institutes in California, Ethiopia and Nepal. Most of his paintings will focus on coronaviruses, with more information on viruses underlying unexplained respiratory diseases, according to lead researcher David Wang, professor of pathology and immunology.
It’s a familiar picture for him: it was one of the identifiers of the original SARS virus in 2003. Working on viral characterization ever since, and observing the onset of MERS and the Covid-19 virus, gives you a voluntary idea of where surveillance is and Pandemic Predictions are inadequate, which the new network can remedy.
“We learned almost nothing from SARS,” he says. This has shown us that it wants a solid public fitness infrastructure and that it wants to be prepared for the option of immediate dissemination, but we have never invested enough in public fitness, because public fitness is prevention, and when it works well, it is nothing. happens. “
Earlier this year, one of the members of the new network exhausted public investment problems. In April, the NIH won a $3. 7 million grant over five years to examine the bat coronaviruses of a small New York nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, which was part of Predict, because it was taking part with the Wuhan Virology Institution. came a week after President Trump learned of the assignment at a press convention and promised to “end this grant” very quickly. “
By now, the subsidy had already been renewed for a period of one moment, and had proven useful: the coronaviruses discovered through the joint assignment were used to verify the efficacy of the remedy with Covid-19 remdesivir. The cancellation invaded the clinical community. Thirty-one clinical societies, comprising several hundred thousand scientists, have signed a joint verification letter; 77 Nobel laureates also In August, the NIH reinsorfied the grant, but promptly suspended it again, and told EcoHealth that it could only recover cash if it performed the most implausible responsibilities, such as resurrecting Wuhan’s lab and accounting for traffic movements around the institute.
These conditions, such as the initial suspension, were widely perceived as policies, which pressured the organization to sacrifice Chinese assistants to please the house Blanca. Es surprising, to say the least, that EcoHealth has been selected as one of the study centers for Even stranger, was selected on the basis of an application last year. That is, it was evaluated for this grant at the same time that THE OFFICIALS withdrew the other.
Regardless of the maneuvers, EcoHealth is now leading a task within CREID, which it calls the Emerging Infectious Disease Research Collaboration Center: Southeast Asia (under the correct acronym EID-SEARCH). The call would possibly allude to how NIAID, the source of the new grants and directed through Dr. Tony Fauci, has overcome the controversy. The EcoHealth Alliance will not operate in China; their assignments are in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
“We don’t apply for paintings in China,” says Peter Dazsak, the group’s ceo. “Of course, during the time we implemented to be a component of it, we were still running it. But what we found vital to look at in Southeast Asia, because it is the regional center of zoonotic pathogens: Nipah virus, repeated avian influenza, coronavirus, even evidence of the Ebola virus. “
The purpose is not only to make a surveillance that identifies viruses in animals as they approach human domain, but also a consultation of the upcoming tests that allow them to identify exposed humans and then get to the bottom of the behaviors that have allowed those other people to be exposed. “We need to ask communities, “Do you eat wild animals?” If you don’t catch him, who sells it?How much do you pay for it?” said Daszak, We need to identify incentives for other people to put themselves in danger and, therefore, what can we do to replace behaviors to lessen that threat.
The goal, he says, is to place the new studies at the point of meeting prevention and response: to anticipate where pathogens are spread in humans in time to prevent them, or to notice the first cases in humans before they can spread. “The strategy against the pandemic is what it was a century ago: wait for a pandemic to emerge and hope that we can involve it,” she says. “We can’t do it again. It’s a forward-sighted way to do things differently. “