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There are many things we don’t know. We do not know all the viruses of Latin American bats. We don’t know the travels of all the mosquitoes or all the diseases they carry across the continent. But there is one thing we do know: at some point, one of these pathogens will cause a new public health crisis. Since the covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization repeats it incessantly. “It’s not a question of if it will happen, but when.”
“The day that passes, eyes are going to roll away. We anticipated it, we monitored it, the information is there, it exists, but no one wanted to listen to us.” This is Ana Laura Vigueras, researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “The entire tropical belt of America has several hot spots where epidemic events could emerge.” The region has the necessary ingredients: high biodiversity, therefore a great variety of pathogens, and a profound alteration of ecosystems as a result of processes such as deforestation. This generates more animal hosts for these pathogens and the distance with humans is shortened, making zoonotic events more possible, that is, jumps of viruses from animals to humans, as happened with covid-19 or mpox. . According to the latest update from the WHO, There are more than 30 priority pathogens with the potential to generate an epidemic or pandemic.
“Pandemics are going to be more frequent, but why?” asks Adrián Díaz, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina. “Because we are going to continue exploiting human resources, we are going to continue consuming as we consume and we are going to continue supporting the system that we support. But it is a choice, it is not that nature is determined to exterminate humanity,” he says sarcastically.
Dr. Adrián Díaz, director of the Arbovirus laboratory at the University of Córdoba, in Villa la Angostura (Argentina).COURTESY
Díaz, like Vigueras, is one of the scientists who works precisely on that choice: the future can be different if we change global dynamics but also if we dedicate ourselves to knowing the dynamics of ecosystems, the viruses that inhabit them and their interaction with the humans in order to prevent and prepare. His laboratory, at the University of Córdoba, specializes in viruses transmitted by arthropods, such as mosquitoes, which are vectors of diseases such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya or the Mayaro virus, among others, all named in the list. of the WHO. “My interests have to do with the interactions that these viruses have with vectors and the environment,” he explains. “We study how certain human activities affect the activity of these viruses, because we already know that human activities can cause their emergence.”
Together with his team, they are trying to answer a vital question: has dengue become endemic in Argentina? The researcher explains that “it was always thought that the virus needed to be introduced every year from another place,” but after the country went through the worst dengue epidemic in its history this year, they saw the need to rethink that belief and analyze whether The virus no longer only circulates in cities but also circulates in jungle animals. “What is the public health risk of that? If dengue settles in a jungle cycle, I will have it installed there forever (…) because I can’t go to the jungle to control the activity, it gets out of my hands,” he explains.
There is bad news: “in the jungle of Jujuy we collect bats that are already infected with dengue.” Díaz regrets the impassivity in the face of calls for attention. “We have been saying that the virus was going to become endemic for years (…) And it is now that they are worried.” The next health crisis will not necessarily be a new disease, but may be an old acquaintance.
Díaz’s team sets up light traps at different heights in La Pampa, Argentina, to investigate the interaction between mosquitoes and virus-hosting birds.Adrian Diaz
On the other side of the continent, Sergio Triana does investigate “pathogen X”, the mysterious name given by the WHO to the possibility that a still unknown infectious agent causes a pandemic. Triana is a young Colombian scientist who works in two laboratories at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, United States. “We tried to create a comprehensive protocol using the viruses we currently have as a reference,” explains the researcher. “These things don’t appear out of nowhere, it will always be similar to something that already exists (…) and if we have vaccines or treatments for similar pathogens, it will be much easier to modify.”
However, Triana points out that “if we are not actively monitoring” what type of virus is circulating, “it will appear out of nowhere.” In part, that is why his work focuses on deciphering known pathogens such as Ebola, lassa fever or the nipah virus, hemorrhagic fevers also prioritized by the WHO. He published one of the first studies that analyzed at a cellular and molecular level the reaction of the immune system, in this case in primates, to Ebola, information that has been available “for twenty years with other viruses”, but unknown with these fevers. “There is an information gap that greatly limits what we can do and how we can respond,” he argues.
In part, this is due to the need to have biosafety level 4 laboratories to handle these dangerous pathogens. There are less than 30 around the world and none of them are in Colombia. “Most of these diseases come from the tropics and the global south, but most research is done in countries where they are not endemic, and it is not because there are no scientists or knowledge, it is because of a lack of funding and opportunities,” laments Triana. .
Tiana and her team in Ede, Nigeria, where they shared the single-cell genomics technique. ACEGID
One initiative that attempts to remedy this is the Eldorado International Joint Laboratory (LMI)where Ana Vigueras works. Located in Mérida, Yucatán, and attached to UNAM, it is becoming a reference center in emerging diseases and biodiversity from the Mexican tropics. Through several projects, Vigueras and a diverse team do “monitoring of viral pathogens [en animales de la región] “that could lead to epidemic outbreaks,” such as hantaviruses, a poorly researched agent that resides in rodents, coronaviruses or influenza, among many others.
“We can identify new pathogens or viruses that one thinks are not distributed in this region,” he explains. For example, one of their findings is the presence of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the Covid-19 virus, in wild rodents, implying that the pathogen jumped from humans back to animals, key information. to understand the transmission circuits that the disease is taking.
It is arduous work that began in March 2020, under the omen come true of the covid-19 pandemic. This October, the laboratory inaugurates a new headquarters where level 2 biosafety work can be carried out, but at the beginning, the LMI was Vigueras’ home. “Tables were placed in the living room, microscopes were installed, the dining room was the office, the garage was the cellar,” recalls the researcher. “Now that I say it out loud, it is a source of pride to build something like this from scratch.”
Dr. Sergio Triana with two PhD students from Harvard and MIT in the biosafety level 4 laboratory in Ede, Nigeria, after processing blood samples. ACEGID
After the pandemic, the three researchers agree that there is more interest in emerging diseases and pathogens that could pose a risk in the future. “Before there were me and four people in the world, during the pandemic it was half the world, and now there are no longer four of us, there are forty” doing research in this field, summarizes Triana. In addition, he adds, it made it possible to implement “the infrastructure to do pathogen genomics” to “identify if there were new variants, to do PCR [las pruebas de detección]”, something that “many countries did not have before.” “Countries realized that if we had prepared ten years ago, we would have avoided a lot of problems,” he says.
But the attention that emerged in the wake of Covid-19 is not enough if it is not sustained. “The financiers begin to inject money to investigate the outbreak that is fashionable right now, but it disappears and there is no more effort,” laments Vigueras. “The reaction we have is very explosive (…) Many laboratories that were opened during the covid are now closed, wasted, allowing monitoring of other diseases that are important,” he claims.
For both Vigueras and Díaz, the priorities are epidemiological surveillance and “knowing more about the ecology of viruses” to “develop predictive models of emergency potential,” in the words of the Argentine researcher. Given the pandemic that will happen, Díaz considers that the region will be well protected if it achieves a “mix between having technology, human talent and an investigative tradition.” The talent and tradition, without a doubt, are there.
