Ignoring animal health leaves the back door wide open to the next pandemic
From SARS to MERS, swine flu, Ebola, and avian influenza, animal-borne diseases have been the root cause of every major pandemic in the past century. Yet, five years on since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a new pandemic agreement signed at the World Health Assembly omits a key vulnerability: animal health, writes Robert Kelly, President of AnimalhealthEurope.
“One Health” — integrating human, animal and environmental health — is emphasised as a core part of the solution. But investment in the prevention of animal-borne diseases, or zoonoses, as well as veterinary science and animal health more generally, is left out of this plan.
To truly be ready for the next pandemic, we must confront the uncomfortable truth: we are continuing to overlook a golden opportunity to nip would-be pandemics in the bud by closing the animal health gap.
A 2022 World Bank report estimated that investing $10–11 billion annually in zoonotic prevention, through veterinary and ecological systems, could prevent pandemics with trillion-dollar global costs. Yet, despite up to 80 per cent of emerging infectious diseases starting in animals, the world continues to underinvest.
This lack of investment in upstream prevention is what is prompting a growing body of research to come to the conclusion that many countries across Europe and around the world are critically under-prepared for another major animal disease outbreak.
Closing this gap could not happen soon enough. As a recent World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) report warned us, due to warming climates and increasingly global markets, zoonotic diseases are spreading faster and to new regions.
Peste des petits ruminants (PPR), for example, which was once thought confined to developing countries, has resurfaced in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary in the past year. Meanwhile, Germany experienced its first foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in nearly four decades, costing the nation over $1 billion, and avian influenza spread to mammals at double the rate last year than the year before rate, heightening concerns about potential human transmission and a subsequent pandemic.
Without setting aside funding and enforceable targets for upstream defences against these rising animal diseases, the new WHO Pandemic Agreement lacks teeth.
So, how do we make up for lost time? First, while the new agreement rightly emphasises vaccine equity for humans, it overlooks one of the cheapest, safest and most proactive measures to stop pandemics before they start: vaccinating animals that carry the zoonoses.
France, for example, in 2023 became the first EU country to vaccinate ducks nationwide against avian influenza in an effort to curb the spread of the disease. As a result of the campaign, expected outbreaks were cut by 94 per cent, from 700 to just 10 nationwide.
Second, we need to strengthen veterinary infrastructure and services to bolster early detection and prevention capacity, before zoonoses become a pandemic threat.
One critical vulnerability in the global veterinary system, for example, lies in the inadequate number of trained veterinarians. This leads to a vet-to-livestock ratio insufficient for effective surveillance and zoonotic prevention. This is true across Europe, but especially in low- and middle-income countries.
In today's interconnected world, a risk in one location is a risk for all due to globalised markets and travel. To bolster global health security, it is imperative to incorporate binding infrastructure and workforce provisions, including other veterinary infrastructure measures, into international agreements such as the recent WHO Pandemic Agreement.
Third and finally, we need to bring the public and private sectors together to develop better disease surveillance, vaccine development and rapid response mechanisms. As experts at the WOAH General Assembly emphasized, these measures not only improve global health security, but also have knock-on economic and social benefits.
An Ethiopian public-private partnership, EthioChicken, offers a powerful example for Europe and the rest of the world. In just over one year, the project delivered more than 3.2 million vaccinated chicks to 640,000 farmers, which helped many of the farmers triple their egg income and double chicken sales. Beyond the improved income, families benefited from improved household nutrition through increased egg and meat consumption.
Covid-19's enduring devastation serves as a stark reminder of a critical and persistent risk: the systemic neglect of animal health.
If we are serious about preventing the next pandemic, we must learn from past failures and act both accordingly and decisively. This starts with treating animal health as the priority that it is as our frontline of defence protecting against would-be pandemics .
Investing in animal health is non-negotiable. It’s one of the most effective, proactive and lucrative investment strategies we have to stop emerging diseases before they ever endanger people and their livelihoods.
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