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The coronavirus pandemic, which has been going on for the third year, is not only a race to create effective vaccines, but also scientists’ efforts to recognize the symptoms of the next impending pandemic as early as possible. It turns out that in the case of COVID-19, certain signals appeared several months before the Chinese authorities officially announced the new threat. This includes the price of … garlic.
- The Coronavirus Era is Still Not in Sight, with Scientists Warning Other Infectious Disease Pandemics Ahead
- How to detect them early enough? There are some non-obvious teasers
- This is, for example, the price of garlic, increased car traffic in the vicinity of hospitals, confusion on social networking sites or the composition of municipal sewage
- More information can be found on the Onet homepage
The coronavirus pandemic has been going on for 2,5 years. Many countries in the world are experiencing yet another increase in infections, and scientists are constantly wondering what to do to predict possible future epidemics.
New programs are created to create a system of global preparedness to prevent threats related to infectious diseases. One such initiative is the Pandemic Sciences Institute, established at the University of Oxford for £ 100 million. The team will benefit from the experience of the university, which has, among others, development of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The institute’s task will be to track viral threats in order to be able to develop new drugs and vaccines against pathogens as soon as possible, before they do much damage.
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“If COVID-19 could be stopped right at the start, when the first cases of the disease appeared in China, I think we would have avoided what we are seeing today,” said Christophe Fraser, professor of infectious disease epidemiology and one of the institute’s members.
How was this possible? By applying blockades at the local level and introducing a travel ban, scientists would start work on vaccines during this time. An example is the SARS epidemic of 2003. The virus has led to over 8 people. infections in 26 countries, but further spread was halted after the blockades were introduced, much earlier than COVID-19.
Prof. Fraser also cites the Ebola virus in Nigeria in 2014 and the MERS virus-induced Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012 as examples of how to effectively reduce the pandemic.
More pandemics are ahead of us
“More epidemics are ahead of us, but we can reduce them in the future by finding early data on emerging pathogens so that we can respond quickly enough,” says Fraser.
A recent UK government study found that there is 50% of the population. a chance for another COVID-19 pandemic in the next 25 years. This growing threat results from the fact that man more and more explores virgin areas where he comes into contact with wild animals that are carriers of previously unknown pathogens.
What are the signs of a developing pandemic? This includes the price of garlic
Experts believe that a pandemic can be predicted by observing certain phenomena that worsen in its initial period. David Bray, director of the GeoTech Center, an American organization that promotes the use of technology to improve our lives, talks about them in an interview with the Daily Mail.
As an example, he cites a tenfold increase in the price of garlic in China 20 years ago. As you know, this plant has many health-promoting properties, especially in Asian countries it is considered a cure for many diseases. The growing demand for garlic, which Bray’s organization observed two decades ago, was the result of mass-buying to remedy growing respiratory ailments at home.
“This was the first sign of SARS, the predecessor of COVID-19,” says David Bray. “ We noticed this five months before China officially revealed there was an outbreak of the new respiratory coronavirus, ” he adds.
As he emphasizes, the same phenomenon took place at the beginning of 2020. Then, the price of garlic in China increased again, and this turned out to be an early signal of the emergence of COVID-19.
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What other red flags were ignored at the time? This is a sharp increase in road traffic. Between August and December 2019, i.e. a few months before the world heard about the virus, satellite images recorded 67%. the increase in car traffic near hospitals in Wuhan, China, where – as is known – the first cases of COVID-19 occurred. This means that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had already been spreading in the local community three months before the first cases were confirmed by Chinese authorities in November 2019.
What else did the coronavirus pandemic look like? A significant increase in searches in Chinese search engines for information about ailments such as cough and diarrhea, which were the first symptoms of the original coronavirus.
Now we are looking at the sewage
Scientists are currently looking at municipal sewage systems. Because if we become infected with pathogens, we then excrete them in the toilet. In the UK, a wastewater monitoring program has been in operation for two years, aimed at capturing traces of the coronavirus in them. Soon after the program was introduced, several of the country’s largest cities noticed that viral DNA levels found in the wastewater were consistent with infection rates in the area.
Scientists now want to use the presence of viruses in wastewater as an alarm signal for future pandemics to emerge.
If wastewater monitoring were part of public health policy at the end of 2019, we might have been warned earlier that COVID-19 is becoming a global threat, says Susan De Long, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Colorado State University.
Social media monitoring can also help detect potential outbreaks. Researchers at the University of Calabria, analyzing such websites in 2019, noticed growing concern about the increasing incidence of pneumonia across Europe. This was before COVID-19 was identified and recognized as a threat.
The analysis of the animal environment cannot be neglected either. Three-quarters of all contagious diseases that arise are zoonoses, that is, diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans. These include rabies caught from dogs, HIV from monkeys, and COVID-19, believed to come from bats. The most serious research centers collect and exchange thousands of samples from animals, trying to detect the sources of many viruses. They also analyze the behavior of animals.
An interesting discovery turned out to be related to the hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. The causing hantaviruses are spread by rodents, in this case the forest mouse. Researchers at the University of New Mexico have found a link between the increase in human infections and the cycles of the El Niño weather phenomenon. The associated warm ocean currents in the Pacific are causing increased rainfall in the southwestern United States, which in turn affects the movement of mice and more frequent contact with people.
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