ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the risk of global pandemics and their diverse origins. It argues that we need to openly tackle the links between human health, animal health and the environment in the context of pandemic risk to think through the issues in a more integrated fashion and better respond to the emergent threats.
In the 1960s and 70s, advances in vaccine and antiviral medications led scientists to conclude that infectious disease was soon to be consigned to the history books. The discovery of Ebola and other haemorrhagic fevers in the mid to late 1970s and the advent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s revealed that novel lethal infectious diseases were continuously emerging.
The chapter discusses how the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2002–2003 was a watershed event in demonstrating how a novel infectious disease could, in a matter of hours, spread to densely populated cities globally. It also reflects on the current COVID-19 pandemic, showcasing its rapid spread of infection globally. It examines experts’ views and concerns ahead of a likely future influenza pandemic (akin to the Spanish Flu of 1918–1919), probably resulting in death tolls of tens of millions of citizens globally.
