Undiscovered and Unknown Viruses Can Now Be Hunted To End Global Viral Pandemic

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If you’ve been to countries where an epidemic has plagued its people, or if you’ve read up on the effects of epidemics on populations in various parts of the world, then it would be apparent that epidemics are no small or light occurrences.

Epidemics have over time, affected lives, destroyed human resources, created wild panic and have often rendered a geographical location incapacitated.

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But then, science, technology and medicine have made it seemingly possible to handle some of these outbreaks over the last couple of decades; however, the intervention usually come after the devastation must have occurred – usually late.

What if, a major virus outbreak could be stopped before it even starts? What if we could simply prevent an epidemic from actually happening?

Well, a new medical project is set to be the game-changer when it comes to solving global epidemic. The new project tagged Global Virome Project (GVP) launching this 2018 is set to take a pro-active measure in tackling the global epidemic issue.

Imagine a world where we can potentially stop the outbreak of epidemics such as Ebola, Zika virus, Lassa virus, SARS, Swine, etc – it is now possible with the Global Virome Project (GVP)

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The need for the Global Virome Project (GVP)

Global response time for viral outbreak, is usually based on reactions to its occurrences. First the outbreak occurs, then people begin to panic, lives get lost over panic and confusion and then the health bodies begin to do everything “humanly” and scientifically possible to stop the epidemic – this gets lots of money spent.

The problem with this method of tackling an epidemic is that apart from the huge costs it generates, it leaves us vulnerable, even to the next epidemic.

A recent interview with Dr Peter Daszak, a parasitologist and the president of the EcoHEath Alliance involved in the GVP scheme revealed that;

“By identifying the vast majority of high-risk viruses that have not yet emerged, we’ll be able to design new strategies to reduce the risk of future pandemics. A good analogy is global terrorism. We don’t wait for a terrorist attack and then try to respond afterwards – we have spent the last few decades building a global understanding of who terrorists are, where they are based, and how to track their communications so we can disrupt their plans ahead of an attack.”

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The Global Virome Project (GVP) and its strategy

To adopt a faster and secure means of stopping viruses before they become epidemic, a similar strategy to that used for terrorism is set to be implemented via the Global Virome Project (GVP). The Global Virome Project (GVP) aims to achieve this by analysing the ecology of viral threats their diversity and what actually drives them.

Presently, 25 viral families are known to exist, and these families contain about 263 infectious viruses that afflict man. However, it is estimated that an undiscovered 1.67 million viral species which exist in bird hosts and mammal still elude scientists.

Of these staggering number, between 631,000 to about 827,000 of these undiscovered viruses are known as “zoonoses” – a kind of virus that have the ability of spreading from animals to human species. This means that these zoonoses – a whole lot of them – could become the next epidemic that afflicts humans, in the process known as zoonotic viral spill over, due to man’s growth and ability to travel the world over.

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Emphasis on the Global Virome Project (GVP)

Stakeholders since 2016, from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, have met repeatedly to design the framework for formulating every aspect of GVP.

Past occurrences of epidemics happened due to lack of information of the animal hosts, and according to Dr Peter Daszak, those are relatively new viruses which originate in wildlife species and get to carry their viruses which are harmless until they infect humans with it.

With the GVP, the idea is to sample a large-scale of these viruses in the regions they are known to exist via fieldwork. Fieldwork and testing aid the understanding of the patterns, history and complete discovery of the emergence of these viruses.

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Challenge of the GVP

Like every huge project with global ramifications, cost is always a challenge. The GVP group have determined that the project would most likely gulp a whopping $7 billion, for implementation.

Past researches on sampling projects have revealed that a majority of the discoveries occur in the early stages of the project. The rarer viruses, their identification and discovery techniques are what consume more of the costs due to their rare nature.

About $1.2billion dollars would be utilized to discover majority of the unknown viruses and their study could be completed in 10 years, meaning that about 16% of the money needed ($7 billion) would be required to cover about 70% of the research.

The rarest viruses which require more funds for studies are quite rare and don’t pose too much a public health risk. And according to the team, the objective of the GVP is to get out information about new viruses after sequencing, genetic code-checking, and verification as quickly as possible to the various health agencies, countries, scientists and the general public within the shortest possible period- mostly probably days.

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Conclusion

The Global Virome Project (GVP) would be beneficial in many ways, once implemented. For instance, the knowledge of majority of the viruses would aid the rapid screening of people, their identification and a faster pathway towards treating and limiting its spread.

Another importance of the Global Virome Project (GVP) would be the reduced risk of contracting a virus which was previously unidentified from an animal. This would be possible if the GVP shows that certain wildlife pose risk of viruses, then their hunting would be banned. Consequently, such animal hosts would be removed as a preventive measure from wildlife markets to prevent further exposure.

The initiative of GVP is not just going to be a health benefit, but would initiate a global push to prevent pandemics globally, and not just to cure them. The GVP would also aid the conservation of healthy wildlife.

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Reference:

• globalviromeproject.org
• science.sciencemag.org
• cugh.org
• ucdavis.edu
• futurism.com

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