‘Get ready for two pandemics a year’, warns CSIRO

Australia must prepare for the emergence of up to two pandemic threats a year, the CSIRO warns in a benchmark report detailing new thinking on the next disease crisis.

’In addition to known viruses, on average two novel viruses are appearing in humans each year and the proportion that give rise to larger outbreaks is growing.’ Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Australia must prepare for the emergence of up to two pandemic threats a year, the CSIRO warns in a benchmark report detailing new thinking on the next disease crisis.

The sobering assessment identifies zoonotic viruses crossing over from animals to people in line with Covid-19 as the most likely cause of future pandemics and finds ­lethal breakouts are increasing in frequency.

The biggest dangers include coronaviruses such as Covid-­causing SARS-CoV-2, the para­myxoviruses involved in deadly Australian Hendra disease and its Asian cousin, Nipah, as well as flaviviruses responsible for ­mosquito-borne dengue and Zika infections.

“As the world continues to better understand these connections between human, animal, plant and environmental health … it is becoming clearer that viruses are shifting between species at alarming rates,” the report says.

“In addition to known viruses, on average two novel viruses are appearing in humans each year and the proportion that give rise to larger outbreaks is growing. Many of these viruses have pandemic potential – the potential to spread across multiple continents.”

Co-author Michelle Baker, of CSIRO’s Infectious Disease Resilience Mission, said Australia had done “extraordinarily well” managing Covid-19. This was despite the staggering cost in lives and to livelihoods: $144bn of lost economic output since the pandemic hit in 2020, with the official death toll topping 13,500.

The report to be released on Tuesday, Strengthening Australia’s Pandemic Preparedness, makes 20 recommendations based on the advice of 146 experts from 66 organisations spanning government, industry and research to ready the nation for the next, inevitable emergency.

In addition to the coronavirus, paramyxovirus and filovirus families, the influenza virus and Ross River fever-inducing togavirus should be targeted as pandemic starters, CSIRO says.

“Global understanding across most viruses of pandemic potential is insufficient to mount a medical countermeasure response in a relativity short timeframe,” the report cautions.

“With finite resources, Australia could benefit from focusing preclinical efforts on viral families posting a high pandemic risk to humans … this results in Coronaviridae, Flaviviridae, Orthomyxoviridae (‘flu), Paramyxoviridae and Togaviridae as viral families with the highest pandemic potential.”

 

Key to the plan are recommendations to diversify the nation’s drug manufacturing capacity across a wider number of vaccine types - including emergent recombinant protein and viral vector technologies - and boost the “repurposing” of existing therapeutics and antivirals against known pandemics agents.

Australia’s genomic testing systems needed to be upgraded after collapsing in the teeth of the Omicron onslaught, with fewer than 2 per cent of cases sequenced this February against 50 per cent in October 2020.

In the absence of a “universal governance arrangement” to share genomic data nationally, CSIRO proposes a national genomic analysis authority to improve information flow. This would tighten co-operation between scientists and regulators in the fields of human, animal and environmental health, a must when dealing with a novel virus such as SARS-CoV-2, which likely jumped from bats to people.

The existing Communicable Diseases Genomic Network, a panel of experts from top research labs and institutes, could be expanded to fill the role. Dr Baker would not buy into the politically charged debate over whether Australia should set up a centralised agency in the style of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to run pandemic readiness and response, saying the report was ­focused on scientific and techno­logical measures.