AP
In this 2009 file photo, Hong Kong police officers guard a hotel which was sealed off after the first swine flu victim in the city was confirmed to have stayed there.
London - For many, the dimly remembered panics over the bird-flu, swine-flu and Sars pandemics may now seem like a case of the authorities crying wolf, or even a conspiracy to boost the profits of Big Pharma. But to “virus hunter” Professor Nathan Wolfe, these viruses, which had all crossed over from wild animals, were merely the first gusts of a viral storm blowing out of the jungle and heading straight towards us.
Last year, Professor Wolfe's work led to the creation of an embryonic early-warning network of “viral listening posts” across Africa and Asia. The network earned his not-for-profit Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (now renamed Global Viral) the label of the “CIA of the viral world” and its founder a place in Time magazine's top 100 most influential people of 2011.
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“After all, despite all the efforts of the public health authorities, swine flu still infected 10 per cent of the world's population, and if it had been a little more deadly it could have easily killed millions.”
However, for Professor Wolfe there is also hope as, along with “the wonderful precedent of earlier efforts of the campaign to eliminate smallpox”, we now have “a whole load of tools that mean for the first time we can do something to prevent one of these hugely costly pandemics”.
Ultimately, he can imagine the possibility of a single global viral control room. Imagine Dr Strangelove's war room, but with the enemy being swarming viruses. Professor Wolfe was first made aware of the danger posed by the viral reservoirs carried around by wild animals - particularly in the jungle hotspots of Africa and Asia - as a field researcher in Cameroon and Uganda, where he witnessed the devastation wrought by Aids.
His own research on the many variations of the HIV virus in the villages he was monitoring showed just how big the viral reservoir was.
He believes that, while humans and this viral reservoir have always been connected “through the catching and butchering of wild game”, the further we have moved away from our origins as hunter-gatherers the more vulnerable we have become to viruses that we would once as a species have had immunity to.
So the “accelerating interconnectivity of the modern world” has helped to create the potential for a viral storm because any virus that crosses over and which would have burnt out in a small population (victims either dying or developing immunity) “now has, in a world of six billion people, the potential to spread and spread, as people are the fuel of viruses”.
It occurred to Professor Wolfe (and to others such as Dr Larry Brilliant, the president of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, as well) that improving scientific knowledge plus technological advances meant that for the first time humanity could start “imaging a kind of global immune system” that would be able to predict and then prevent viral outbreaks by “harnessing the power of data”.
By aggregating together information gathered from jungle hunters reporting strange deaths of wild animals that might warn of a new dangerous viral mutation, with data from “global organisations whose sickness records of their global workforce could pick up the first signs of a spreading virus”, and even by “looking at what people are posting via their smartphones,” it should be possible to predict an outbreak and then monitor how fast it is spreading.
Professor Wolfe, though, is concerned that “understandable fears over privacy” will hinder the “good use” of .....With bird flu on a new killing spree in Indonesia, we have to hope he is right http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/science/news/deadliest-prey-in-the-jungle-viruses-1.1372921
