Preventing Zoonotic Disease Emergence: Lessons and Policy Opportunities for 2010-2020

Emerging zoonoses have caused extensive burden on public health as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in financial losses over the past decade. Despite these impacts, public health systems are in large part unprepared for zoonotic disease outbreaks, lacking policies that bridge human, animal, and environmental silos. A recent World Bank report estimated that investments of over $2 billion per year are needed through 2020 to sufficiently strengthen capacity to address zoonotic disease risks. In 2009 USAID launched the Emerging Pandemic Threat (EPT) program, including the PREDICT project, aimed to help build predictive capacity for emerging diseases. PREDICT conducted pathogen surveillance in wildlife in twenty “hotspot” countries for disease emergence and developed mechanisms to link public health, agriculture, and environment ministries toward an integrated approach to prevention and early detection of zoonotic diseases. The EPT-2 program, launched in the fall of 2014, builds on these efforts and addresses capacity building needs identified from the first EPT phase, including developing a workforce to implement and support One Health efforts, and creating infrastructure to more effectively prepare for and respond to zoonotic disease outbreaks. The program also includes emphasis on concurrent human-wildlife pathogen sampling, behavioral risk factors, and analysis of the cost-effectiveness of One Health. Lessons and approaches from the EPT projects provide direction for policy opportunities and priorities that can be pursued more widely over the next five years, including in the U.S., to better enable us to prevent emerging zoonoses.