Hosted by Simon Fraser University
This talk considers how we can measure the public health value of efforts to discover viruses in nonhuman animal populations (virus prospecting) as a means of advancing countermeasures for pandemic and epidemic diseases.
Using the example of filoviruses, we show that there is little evidence to suggest that countermeasure development has been accelerated due to virus prospecting work.
Zooming out, many potentially and actually important pathogens for human health still lack vaccines, so adding more candidate pathogens does not accelerate a rate limiting step. We consider the implications of these findings for policy.
Speaker: Dr. Marc Lipsitch