Finding Them Before They Find Us: Solving the Emerging Infectious Disease Crisis

The human population grows daily, it’s on the move, and it’s carving a deep technological footprint on our planet. We alter landscapes and perturb ecosystems, inserting ourselves and other species into novel regions of the world, leading to potentially irreversible changes in the biosphere. This is not news. More than 75 years ago, Charles Elton, one of the founders of modern ecology, wrote, “We must make no mistake; we are seeing one of the greatest historical convulsions in the world’s fauna and flora.” We are also in the midst of a public health and epidemiological crisis. Climate change alters movements and geographic distributions for myriad species. Transporting people and goods carries countless pathogens of humans and our domestic animals and crops hourly around the globe. Previously isolated species come into sudden contact. Pathogens and parasites encounter hosts with no resistance and no time to evolve any. This is also not news—maladies rare or unknown four or five decades ago, like HIV and Ebola, West Nile Virus and Avian Influenza, and now SARS-CoV-2—have become commonplace. In such a world—this world—the only world we will ever know—events like these are ongoing. Scarcely a week passes without news of a new pathogen trading up to a human host. This is the crisis of Emerging Infectious Disease (EID). We must mount an all-out effort to discover and document the species—pathogens and hosts—on our globe before it is too late to cope effectively with the crisis.