We Must Prevent the Next Pandemic, Not Build Perfect Conditions for It (Commentary)

By Chris Walzer

• How the world reacted to the recent disease outbreaks tells us more about inequity than about epidemiology, a new op-ed argues.
• Beside the lopsided coverage of affected populations, both outbreaks point to the fact that these events are not isolated biological accidents, but predictable consequences of the ecological, economic, and political systems we have built.
• “The first signal of the next outbreak will not come from a high-tech laboratory or a global summit. It will most likely come from a ranger deep in a protected forest, a community health worker in a remote village, or a hunter reporting a dead chimpanzee along a forest trail. The question is whether the world is willing to invest in listening before the crisis reaches everyone else,” the author writes.
• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In recent weeks, two outbreaks captured international attention: a hantavirus cluster linked to a cruise ship and an escalating outbreak of Bundibugyo ebolavirus in Central and Eastern Africa. How the world reacted to these outbreaks tells us more about inequity than about epidemiology.

The Andes hantavirus outbreak aboard a luxury cruise ship generated extensive evacuation footage and widespread public anxiety. The numbers involved were small, and public health authorities clearly emphasized that the broader risk was very low. Meanwhile, the Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) outbreak, involving a rapidly increasing number of cases and deaths, spreading across fragile border regions, and unfolding without an approved vaccine, or therapeutics, still struggles to command comparable global urgency despite its coverage in the news.

This disparity reflects an uncomfortable and common truth: some outbreaks become global emergencies only when wealthy travelers, tourists, or Western borders appear threatened. Others remain regional tragedies, normalized by poverty, and neglect. However, both outbreaks point to the same deeper reality. These events are not isolated biological accidents, but predictable consequences of the ecological, economic, and political systems we have built.

Global health has largely focused on responding to outbreaks after they emerge, while neglecting primary prevention: reducing the conditions that drive spillover in the first place. Both Andes hantavirus and Bundibugyo ebolavirus are zoonotic pathogens maintained in wildlife reservoirs, underscoring how deeply human health remains intertwined with ecological systems.

We are intensifying the contact rates between wildlife, livestock, and people at unprecedented scales. Deforestation, mining, agro-industrial expansion, road building, the wildlife trade, and rapid urbanization continue to fragment ecosystems, creating interfaces between once separated species and their pathogens. Pathogens do not “spill over” in a vacuum. We create the conditions that make spillover possible.

For more than two decades, my colleagues and I at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have worked alongside frontline communities, park rangers, veterinarians, and government partners in some of the world’s highest risk spillover regions. In northern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), our teams helped establish a community-based wildlife mortality surveillance network across 50,000 square kilometers (about 19,300 square miles) as an early warning system for Ebolavirus spillover.

Rangers, hunters, and local communities were engaged as partners in surveillance efforts, co-developing approaches to recognize and document unusual wildlife mortality events, collecting biological samples, and raising the alarm long before a human outbreak might be recognized. This work is not theoretical. It reflects a simple reality: prevention is possible. But it requires sustained investment long before the world notices an outbreak.

The cruise ship itself is a powerful metaphor for the modern world. At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of passengers and crew are moving across oceans aboard densely packed vessels that function as floating petri dishes for infectious diseases. Individuals from vastly different immune landscapes and pathogen exposures mingle in enclosed environments before repeatedly disembarking across multiple continents within days. Oceans once acted as barriers to disease spread; today with cruise ships they function as corridors.

But while cruise ships symbolize hyper-connectivity and global mobility, the BVD outbreak in Africa reveals another equally dangerous reality. In affected regions, communities already face enormous burdens from endemic diseases such as malaria and measles, which share similar symptoms with BVD and which complicate and slow early diagnosis and containment.

Rudimentary health systems strained by underfunding, insecurity, and workforce shortages often struggle simply to maintain routine care, let alone rapidly identify an emerging viral disease. In the Ituri Province in northeastern DRC and border regions of eastern DRC, South Sudan and Uganda, years of conflict, displacement, and resource exploitation have severely weakened trust in institutions and damaged the healthcare infrastructure needed for effective surveillance and response.

The precipitous dismantling of international support and critical global health capacity this past year has created large blind spots in surveillance, diagnostics, workforce retention, and outbreak preparedness across these extremely fragile and volatile frontline landscapes. Viruses exploit governance vacuums as efficiently as ecological disruption.

The world often treats outbreaks in low-income regions as unfortunate yet distant realities until they threaten wealthier nations directly. This mindset fundamentally misunderstands how infectious disease emergence and spread works in our hyperconnected world. It is not only an epidemiological failure, but also a moral failure.

What is striking from years of working in these landscapes is the chronic absence of resources. Communities living at the frontlines of emergence are often asked to shoulder the burden of global health risk with the least infrastructure, the fewest healthcare workers, the weakest surveillance systems, and increasingly uncertain international support.

The first signal of the next outbreak will not come from a high-tech laboratory or a global summit. It will most likely come from a ranger deep in a protected forest, a community health worker in a remote village, or a hunter reporting a dead chimpanzee along a forest trail. The question is whether the world is willing to invest in listening before the crisis reaches everyone else.

We cannot continue treating outbreaks as unforeseeable shocks while systematically constructing the conditions that make them inevitable. Until prevention becomes as politically urgent as response, outbreaks like BVD will not be exceptions. They will be forecasts.

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Previously Published on news.mongabay with Creative Commons Attribution

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