The world must address pandemic threats urgently, says former CDC officer

"[The]cruel irony here [is] that the world cannot get its act together to address these threats … people are dying, animals are suffering, we're losing rainforest … these are all interconnected threats," Neil Vora tells me on this week's episode of the Mongabay Newscast, just a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 80 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo from an outbreak of the Ebola virus.

Vora is a former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemic intelligence service officer who deployed to the DRC to combat Ebola. He says the current strain, the Bundibugyo virus, is particularly dangerous because there is no current approved treatment or vaccine for it. While neither this virus nor the Andes virus, a type of hantavirus that originated in Chile and Argentina and killed three people on a cruise ship, is likely to cause a pandemic, says Vora, he stresses member states of the WHO are unprepared to address a pandemic should one occur.

According to Vora, the WHO could have achieved a pandemic agreement to better address the threats pandemics pose. But that fell short when nations failed to adopt a system to equitably share tools such as vaccines.

" And now those discussions on the pandemic agreement have stalled, and days later, we have these two outbreaks of zoonotic viruses."

Neil Vora is the executive director of the Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition.

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Image Credit: Minks at a Swedish fur farm in 2009. Living in small cages very close to each other makes for easier transmission of pathogens. Image courtesy of Jo-Anne McArthur/Djurrattsalliansen/We Animals Media.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Two outbreaks

(07:55) Fur farms present a pandemic risk

(15:17) Banning fur farms in the EU

(23:10) 'We're hurting ourselves'

(29:29) Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition