We need to talk about the next pandemic now

“REMEMBER mom, the best thing is not always the obvious thing, ” my seven-year-old solemnly said to me suddenly one evening.

This sudden nugget of "Hello Ninja" wisdom stuck with me, and in fact, later made me realise that the worst thing is also not always the obvious thing.

The Covid-19 pandemic - which for a moment seemed to be making an exit - has changed its mind and is now set to crash the party even longer.

Intensifying the vaccination roll-out may encourage this pesky bug to go away and sleep it off somewhere to give us a chance to clean up the house and get a break.

However, that depends on whether enough people (i.e. 22 – 28 million humans for Malaysia at least) want to and can get vaccinated in time, especially since the vaccines are not yet approved for young children.

In the meantime, we go in and out of lockdowns, wistfully remember the days when getting our passports stamped was a thing, and try to keep calm and carry on under these very weird and uncertain times.

We watch the daily case numbers and shudder, and we hold our breath as the death toll increases because we now know with certainty each and every one of those numbers is a person we have lost to this terrible rapidly ravaging infectious disease. We now know those numbers include people we know, perhaps even people we love.

But the obvious terrors from this pandemic are not the worst thing.

In 2013, a comprehensive study concluded that the next disease to jump from animals to humans (as Covid-19 did) will be closely linked to the “evolution of the agriculture-environment nexus”.

Despite the fact that we have technologies that increase crop yields, land conversion for agricultural use continues to increase. We often talk about how rampant agricultural expansion causes deforestation, biodiversity loss and release of greenhouse gases which accelerates climate change.

However, the impact of our continuous encroachment of forests and wildlife habitats on the spread of infectious diseases from animals to humans (ie zoonotic disease), being the likely root of new pandemics, is less obvious. Recent analysis suggests that climate change influenced the migration of bat species into the hypothesized region of the origin of viruses that cause SARS and Covid-19.

Because of their peculiar traits such as being the only mammals that can fly (for distances up to 1000km at that), dietary habit of spitting out half-chewed fruits, hibernation in large crowded roosts, and ability to tolerate infection from various viruses, bats are often blamed (and punished) for the many diseases that they spread to other animals.

But bats are simply victims of habitat loss, driven out of their homes and forced to find new niches to survive—ever so often, this results in opportunities for the viruses they host to also find new niches to survive.

All wildlife are vulnerable to zoonotic diseases in recently deforested areas because broken habitats means previously separated species can now interact and the viruses they carry can be interchanged through exposure to contaminated soil, food, water, or vectors such as rodents and other objects.

This is why the conversion of species-rich primary forests for agricultural, industrial, and urban development is associated with over 56% increase in documented infectious diseases. This situation is worsened when we also condone a culture of problematic human–wildlife interactions such as consumption of bushmeat and exotic traditional medicine leading to the establishment of large wildlife wet markets, as well as wildlife feeding and global exotic pet trading.

All of these create the conditions that are ripe for any number of viruses to become the next Covid-19.

So as bad as Covid-19 feels right now, what is worse is that there may well be another Covid-19 waiting for us in the future. Because, unless we start also talking about changing these conditions that led us into this situation, we will go through this again as a species, and if not in our lifetime, in that of our children or their children’s lifetime.

Pandemics and plagues are as old as human civilization. But the frequency and global wrath of Covid-19 is telling us that pandemics can only get worse UNLESS we start talking and doing something about it now.

What are some of these things?

The evidence is saying repeatedly the same thing: We need transdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder and steward co-creation of action plans, and communication and community engagement strategies to address the urgency of zoonotic disease prevention through natural habitat management and conservation and sustainable agriculture.

We need a joint effort by conservation advocates, NGOs, wildlife biologists, veterinarians, and local authorities to harmonise regulation and community engagement in order to reduce public demand, consumption, and alter social norms involving wildlife.

We also need to address the elephant in the room ie the barriers in communication between disciplines, stakeholders and stewards. As long as our shared problems are only approached from one party and one angle, we may be doomed to constantly miss the forest for the trees and find ourselves painfully underprepared even for the next pandemic.

To be able to work together, we need to talk to and understand each other. We need to normalise the language to a “minimum common technical translation” across disciplines and equip our experts (and future experts) with strategies in science communication to converse with stakeholders and stewards so that we can have meaningful transdisciplinary discussions and public engagement moving forward.

Success in communication throughout the pandemic is half the battle won, and to prepare and hopefully prevent the next pandemic we need to start talking about this now.

To do that we need to address problems in communication as equal scientific challenges and place these problems at the forefront of our priorities in pandemic preparedness.

This effort would be challenging to say the least. But my sagacious son also continued to remind me “The easiest thing is not always the obvious thing.” (I am not sold on this one)

But one thing is certain. If we keep ignoring this less obvious problem in our collective inability to talk to one another, it will come back to haunt us in the form of another pandemic. That would be the worst thing.