An interesting approach to zoonotic risk assessment.
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Given the death toll of COVID-19 and the enormous economic and social havoc it has left in its wake, reducing the risk of future zoonotic events and mitigating their impact on human health and society should be important public health objectives. Meeting these objectives requires a dual-pronged approach, because zoonotic spillover events present two distinct but related public health challenges. A “spillover risk” is associated with viruses that can be transmitted to humans from other animals, sometimes repeatedly, and lead to severe illness or death; these pathogens are, however, not able to establish further human-to-human transmission since humans are dead-end hosts for them. By contrast, a virus has “epidemic potential” if, upon spilling over into humans, it is able to establish transmission between humans. For example, West Nile virus (WNV) infects thousands of humans in the USA each year, and a significant proportion of patients suffer severe neuroinvasive disease such as meningitis. Yet, WNV does not have “epidemic potential” because it is primarily transmitted among birds via a Culex mosquito vector. Viruses with epidemic potential, such as SARS-CoV-2, comprise only a small subset of zoonotic spillover events. Their early detection, as well as preventing or limiting their spread, should therefore be the focus of pandemic preparedness plans.
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a tip of the hat to Roland