One Health's Readiness For The Upcoming Pandemic

Abstract

Animals are the source of most newly discovered infectious diseases. Routine surveillance currently focuses on known diseases and clinical syndromes, but the growing probability of new disease outbreaks highlights how crucial it is to identify unusual illnesses or pathogen circulation early on, before human disease manifests. The necessity of early warning surveillance at the interface of humans, animals, and the environment is the main focus of this viewpoint. The scale of pathogen genome sequencing has been revolutionized by the COVID-
19 pandemic, and if we avoid the mistake of developing them exclusively for the case at hand, the current investments in global genomic surveillance offer great potential for a novel, truly integrated Disease X (with epidemic or pandemic potential) surveillance arm. Instead of detection and sequencing protocols that concentrate on what we already know, generic tools use metagenomic sequencing as a catch-all method. Although it is technically difficult, creating agnostic or more focused metagenomic sequencing to evaluate uncommon diseases in humans and animals in conjunction with random environmental sample sampling to record pathogen circulation could offer a real early warning system. A true step forward would be to apply the lessons learned and introduce new vital partnerships in a One Health approach to preparedness, as opposed to reestablishing and strengthening the pre-existing silos.