Pandemic – Webinar: expert’s views on emerging diseases and their control

Pandemic – Webinar: expert’s views on emerging diseases and their control

 

The threat of future emerging diseases, and the ways in which the scientific community should respond were examined in a lively international Webinar on 30 June. The Webinar was recorded and is available at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8poA5_XLec

The event, organised jointly by the Consultative Working Group for Animal Health & Welfare and STAR-IDAZ IRC, comprised a one-hour session of short talks to set the scene, followed by a round-table discussion. The discussion included the speakers and representatives of public research institutions, animal health industry and government.

Those speaking were Ilaria Capua (Univ. Florida) covering COVID-19 as an accelerator of multidisciplinary approach to research; Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS Medic School, Singapore) on wildlife in emerging diseases; Christophe Audonnet on ZAPI’s modular approach to vaccine development; Mark Woolhouse (University of Edinburgh) on predicting the next pandemic; and Alex Morrow (STAR-IDAZ IRC) on improving the focus of research to deliver disease control tools.

For the round-table discussion the speakers were joined by Arjan Stegeman (Utrecht University), Jean-Charles Cavitte (European Commission), Hein Imberechts (One health EJP) and Luke O’Neil (Trinity College Dublin).

The event brought in 554 participants from 55 countries.

The discussion covered a number of topics emerging from presentations, including what the main barriers are to adopting a one-health approach. The commonest reasons given were lack of communication, politics, funding structures, and lack of knowledge. For the question on what surveillance would best give early detection of spill over of infection from animals to humans, wildlife surveillance, and passive surveillance combined with rapid diagnostics were the most prominent suggestions.

Posted in Global, News