Peter Daszak is a British zoologist and an expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is currently president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health with headquarters in New York City. He is a researcher, consultant and public expert for media inquiries on the subject of virus-caused epidemics. In late April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) "abruptly terminated" EcoHealth Alliance's research funding.[1][2]

Education

Daszak earned a B.Sc. in Zoology in 1987 at University College of North Wales (UCNW), and a Ph.D. in parasitic infectious diseases in 1994 at University of East London. [3]

Career

Daszak worked at the School of Life Sciences, Kingston University, in Surrey, England in the 1990s. In the late 1990s Daszak moved to the United States and was affiliated with the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia and the National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, Georgia. Later he became executive director at a collaborative think-tank in New York City, the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. He holds adjunct positions at several universities in the U.S. and the U.K., including the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. [3]

He was one of the early adopters of conservation medicine. [4] The Society for Conservation Biology symposium in 2000, had focused on the "complex problem of emerging diseases".[4] He said in 2001 that there were "almost no examples of emerging wildlife diseases not driven by human environmental change...[a]nd few human emerging diseases don't include some domestic animal or wildlife component." His research has focused on investigating and predicting the impacts of new diseases on wildlife, livestock, and human populations, and he has been involved in research studies on epidemics such as the Nipah virus infection, the Hendra virus, SARS-1, Avian influenza, and the West Nile virus. [5]

Daszak has served on committees of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, World Health Organization (WHO), National Academy of Sciences, and United States Department of the Interior. [3] He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and Chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)'s Forum on Microbial Threats and sits on the supervisory board of the One Health Commission Council of Advisors.[6]

Daszak is the president of the New York-headquartered NGO, EcoHealth Alliance,[7] known for its research on global emergent diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Nipah virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, Ebola virus, and COVID-19.

Publications

As of 2020 he has authored or contributed to over 300 scientific papers and been designated a Highly Cited Researcher by the Web of Science. In addition to citations in academic publications, his work has been covered in leading English-language newspapers,[8][9] television and radio broadcasts, documentary films[10] and podcasts.

Media coverage

During times of large virus outbreaks he has been invited to speak as an expert on epidemics involving diseases moving from animals to humans.[6][11][12] At the time of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, Daszak said"Our research shows that new approaches to reducing emerging pandemic threats at the source would be more cost-effective than trying to mobilize a global response after a disease has emerged".[13]

In October 2019, when the federal government "quietly" ended the ten-year old program called Predict, operated by United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s emerging threats division,[14] experts like Daszak, expressed concern that shutting Predict down, could "leave the world more vulnerable to lethal pathogens like Ebola and MERS that emerge from unexpected places, such as bat-filled trees, gorilla carcasses and camel barns."[14] Daszak said that compared to the $5 billion the US spent fighting Ebola in West Africa, Predict—which cost $250 million—was much less expensive. As well, Daszak said, "Predict was an approach to heading off pandemics, instead of sitting there waiting for them to emerge, and then mobilizing."[14]

COVID-19 Pandemic

On February 9, 2020, Newt Gingrich invited Daszak as a special guest along with Anthony Fauci on Newt's World to discuss the coronavirus.[15]

In his February 27, 2020 New York Times article, entitled "We knew Disease X was Coming", Daszak said R&D Blueprint group of experts to which he belonged, had warned the World Health Organization in February 2018 in Geneva, Switzerland, of the "next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn't yet entered the human population". The Blueprint group coined this hypothetical pathogen "Disease X" and was included it on a list of eight diseases which they recommended should be given highest priority in regard to research and development efforts, such as finding better diagnostic methods and developing vaccines.[16] He said, "As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it's worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about."[8]

On March 20, 2020 Daszak was featured in a PBS Newshour special podcast "Understanding the coronavirus".[17]

In April and May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Daszak was interviewed by National Public Radio (NPR),[18] CNN, [19] NBC News,[20] CBS News,[1] and other outlets, refuting the idea that COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a virus resulting from a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In his April 26 interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Daszak said that conspiracy theories had emerged "pointing the finger at China". He said that "politicization" had resulted in "countries" cramp[ing] up" which was unfortunate because "what we need right now is open communication with scientists across the world. China has done a lot to deal with this virus before us. They know a lot about how to control it. We need access to that information and talking in political terms about this outbreak closes down the access."[19]

According to a May 9, 2020 news report by a number of media outlets, National Institutes of Health (NIH) "abruptly terminated" EcoHealth Alliance's "research grant, which was "focused on identifying and warning about coronaviruses dangerous to human health."[1][2]

Daszak was part a segment of the May 11, 2020 broadcast of 60 Minutes. [21]

Awards and Honors

In October 2018, Daszak was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM),[22] which the New York Times has been called the "most esteemed and authoritative adviser on issues of health and medicine" whose "reports can transform medical thinking around the world."[23] In 2000 he received the CSIRO medal for work on amphibian disease.

Dr. Peter Daszak is President of EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organization that conducts research and outreach programs on global health, conservation and international development. Dr. Daszak’s research has been instrumental in identifying and predicting the origins and impact of emerging diseases across the globe. This includes identifying the bat origin of SARS, the drivers of Nipah virus emergence, publishing the first global emerging disease ‘hotspots’ map, discovering SADS coronavirus, designing a strategy to identify the number of unknown viruses in wildlife, launching the Global Virome Project, identifying the first case of a species extinction due to disease, and discovering the disease chytridiomycosis as the cause global amphibian declines. He is one of the founders of the field of Conservation Medicine and has been instrumental in the growth of EcoHealth, One Health, and now Planetary Health.

A fundamental part of the Dr. Daszak’s work on disease ecology is directed by the conviction that disease outbreaks are not just predictable, but preventable. This approach is informed by a perspective on emerging infectious disease research that sees problems of human and animal disease as intimately linked – exacerbated by ecological change. With this in mind, he led the researcher that produced the first ever global emerging disease ‘hotspots’ map to determine where in the world viruses with pandemic potential are most likely to emerge, and developed a strategy to identify just how many of those viruses currently exist.

Dr. Daszak is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and Chair of the NASEM’s Forum on Microbial Threats. He is a member of the NRC Advisory Committee to the US

Bats have been getting a bad rap. Last autumn, a team of scientists tied bats to the deadly SARS outbreaks. Bats in China, they said, are likely where the virus hides between human outbreaks. Then, in December, another group of researchers suggested that bats in Africa serve as a reservoir for the vicious virus for Ebola hemorrhagic fever, which causes its human victims to bleed to death.

Bats have also been definitively tied to two other recently discovered viruses that are lethal to humans: Nipah and Hendra.

But as researchers have worked to uncover the mysterious links between bats and these emerging viruses, they say they have stumbled upon an even wilier culprit working behind the scenes: humans. It now seems that these outbreaks, and likely many others, were set off when people encroached on rain forests, expanded wild animal markets, or made other changes that removed the natural barriers that keep diseases at bay.

"This is not a wildlife problem, it is a human problem," said Jonathan Epstein, an American researcher who spoke by phone from Bangladesh, where he has been investigating the causes of Nipah outbreaks.

The insights that are coming from these outbreaks are feeding an emerging discipline that seeks to redefine the very meaning of health. Epstein and other proponents of this thinking, which they have dubbed "conservation medicine," argue that it is impossible to divorce human health from that of the environment. Emerging viruses like the one that causes SARS are symptoms of the drastic, large-scale changes humans are making in the life of the planet.

At a time of intense concern about avian flu, it is hardly controversial to argue that human health is linked to animal health. But the field challenges traditional academic divisions, especially the cultural divide between doctors and veterinarians. Epstein is a senior research scientist at the New York- based Consortium for Conservation Medicine at Wildlife Trust, which organizes projects that cross the old disciplinary boundaries.

The consortium includes the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University in Massachusetts, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland, and the United States Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin.

As researchers do their detective work around the world, they are finding connections between human society and disease. Global warming could push mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and encephalitis into more northern countries. One new bat-borne disease, the Nipah virus, was tied to the expansion of pig farming in Malaysia. Outbreaks of avian flu have been tied to farms, and the disease's spread has been helped by farmers reluctant to come forward with sick birds.

The researchers hope that by studying these connections, they will discover the means to prevent future epidemics.

After the 2003 outbreaks of SARS, which attacks the respiratory system, scientists initially identified an animal known as a civet as the disease's reservoir, the place where the virus sustains itself between outbreaks in humans. But further testing found that civets were not widely infected. In a paper published online by the journal Science last September, a team that included Epstein and scientists from China and Australia named a new suspect: cave-dwelling horseshoe bats. These bats, they reported, carry a family of viruses very similar to the one that causes SARS.

It is likely, the study found, that one of these "SARS-like" viruses evolved into the SARS virus at an exotic animal marketplace, where it infected civets, which, in turn, infected humans, according to Michael Farzan, a Harvard Medical School assistant professor who was not involved in the research.

But why did this happen when it did? One intriguing possibility is that it is linked to China's economic boom, according to Peter Daszak, a co-author of the SARS paper who is executive director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. With the newfound wealth there, he said, animal markets have grown as more people can afford fresh animal meat. As the markets grow, so do the chances that a virus will jump from one species to the next.

In December, a different group of researchers linked fruit bats to the dreaded Ebola virus. Outbreaks of the disease in humans have been associated with dramatic outbreaks among chimpanzees and gorillas. The team, working in Gabon and Congo Republic, captured various animals near the bodies of chimpanzees and gorillas. They then looked for signs of Ebola virus.

From this, the team found three different species of bats with antibodies to the virus, according to a paper in the journal Nature. Bats are now the leading suspect as the Ebola virus reservoir, but the case against them remains controversial, according to Jens Kuhn, an Ebola specialist at Harvard Medical School. It is thought that changes in human activity are behind the Ebola outbreaks - such as new mining operations deep in forests and the eating of primate meat - Kuhn said, but nobody knows the true origin.

The ties between bats and disease have raised fears in the conservation community that the winged creatures, long maligned and misunderstood, will become the targets of calls for elimination. This would be a mistake, researchers said, because bats play important environmental roles, such as eating pests - and killing off bats would be very difficult in any case.

There are about 1,000 species of bats, making up a fifth of all mammal species.

Kenneth H. Thomas / Photo Researchers, Inc. American bullfrogs are resistant to the lethal amphibian disease known as chytrid, and since they are commonly traded overseas, they are becoming the Typhoid Marys of the amphibian world.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science reported that global trade in amphibians is one of the big culprits in spreading a fungal disease known as chytrid, responsible for the stunning die-off of amphibians across the world.

Half of all amphibians are in decline, while a third are threatened with extinction, because of the pathogen, which carries the formal name Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. It infects the amphibians’ skin cells — through which most amphibians take in water and salts, including those of sodium and potassium — and thickens the skin, reducing its ability to absorb water and salts.

The recent study indicates that not only has the trade spread the disease, it may have created it.

Rhys Farrer of the Imperial College London and his team foundthat different strains of the chytrid fungus were identified in different parts of the globe. Through sequencing of the fungal genome, they found that the extremely lethal form of the fungus was created when two distinct strains came together to create a potent killer.

A likely explanation is that the global trade during the last century brought two strains together, experts say. “Chytrid is one of the most devastating wildlife diseases with the largest host range of any, and responsible for dozens of species’ extinctions and many more extirpations of local populations,” Dr. Farrer said.

The finding highlights the dangers of the worldwide movement of wildlife, including the huge global trade in pets. According toEcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit that researches and works to prevent disease caused by wildlife, 120 million animals – fish, birds and reptiles – are shipped around the globe annually, legally and illegally.

American bullfrogs, which are carriers of the chytrid pathogen but resistant to it, are also widely available for sale; another study, done in 2009, looked at records from the ports of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York from 2000 through 2005 and found “Importation of live amphibians into these ports totaled almost 28 million individuals over this six-year period.”

The illegal wildlife trade, valued at as much as $20 billion a year, is second only to the drug trade in terms of its worth, according to EcoHealth. Some 13 million animals are taken illegally from ecosystems for the pet trade. Many of those species come from “hot spots” in tropical regions where the risk of diseases’ emergence from the wild are high.

Even legal wildlife importation poses a disease risk, not only to other wildlife but to people as well. Diseases in other mammals pose the biggest threat to humans of all wildlife ailments, said Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth. “Phylogenetically they are closer to us, which means we are more likely to share viruses we carry.” he said. “That means if we get infected there’s a higher change of that virus being transmitted human to human.”

One species that he is particularly worried might pass a disease into the human sphere is the sugar glider from Indonesia.

Associated Press A baby sugar glider in a Minnesota home

“They are extremely cute, really good looking little animals, very cheap and very trendy,” Dr. Daszak said. The trouble is, he said, they are coming in straight from the forest, in an emerging disease hotspot.

Plucking animals out of the wild can also cause declines in populations and lead to extinctions.

Earlier this year the EcoHealth Alliance started a program calledPetWatch that seeks to educate consumers to the dangers of exotic diseases on imported pets, from parrots to turtles to monkeys. They also include factors like invasive threats, the sustainability of wild populations and animal welfare issues.

The best bet for a disease-free animal is one that is bred in captivity and so is unlikely to harbor a disease from the wild. Among the best choices, according to Pet Watch, are the bearded dragon and cockatiels, while the worst include the African grey parrot and the squirrel monkey.

A new flu, H7N9, has killed 36 people since it was first found in China two months ago. A new virus from the SARS family has killed 22 people since it was found on the Arabian Peninsula last summer.

In past years, this might have been occasion for panic. Yet chicken and pork sales have not plummeted, as they did during flus linked to swine and birds. Travel to Shanghai or Mecca has not been curtailed, nor have there been alarmist calls to close national borders.

Is this relatively calm response in order? Or does the simultaneous emergence of two new diseases suggest something more dire?

Actually, experts say, the answer to both questions may well be yes.

“We’ve done a great job globally in the last 10 years,” said [Dr. William Bamberger Karesh (born1955)], a wildlife veterinarian and chief of health policy for the EcoHealth Alliance, which tracks animal-human outbreaks. “Compared to H5N1 and SARS, we’re getting on top of these diseases much, much faster.”

But he added that “people have become desensitized over time — it’s ‘Oh, O.K., another one.’ ”

And scientists say the world cannot afford to relax. The threat is real. New diseases are emerging faster than ever.

Peter Daszak, a parasitologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, has even put a number on it: 5.3 new ones each year, based on a study using data from 1940 to 2004. He and his co-authors blamed population growth, deforestation, antibiotic overuse, factory farming, live animal markets, bush meat hunting, jet travel and other factors.

Some aspects of the new viruses are scary. The Arabian coronavirus — now officially named MERS, for Middle East respiratory syndrome — has killed about half of those it infects, while SARS killed less than a quarter; in the lab, it replicates faster than SARS, penetrates lung cells more readily and inhibits the formation of proteins that warn the body that it is under attack.

In her closing remarks on Monday at the annual meeting of the world’s health ministers, Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, said the virus was now her “greatest concern.”

Until experts figure out where it hides and how it infects humans, “we are empty-handed when it comes to prevention,” she said. “These are alarm bells, and we must respond.”

The H7N9 flu has been fatal in a quarter of known cases — the 1918 Spanish flu killed only 2 percent of its victims — and already has one dangerous mutation that helps it replicate at human body temperatures.

Still, better surveillance means that such threats are being caught sooner, giving time to develop countermeasures like vaccines and making it far less likely that a virus like the 1918 flu will ever again kill millions.

It also means that outbreaks that once might have faded away unnoticed now set off alarms, for better and for worse. Fifty years ago, even the dreaded H5N1 bird flu, which emerged in 2003 and kills about half its victims, might have been missed. It makes the jump to humans so rarely that even now it is basically a poultry problem: It has killed millions of chickens and occasional flocks of wild birds, but in a whole decade has claimed only 364 human lives, and that is known only because it can be distinguished from other flus by genetic typing.

The world’s ability to detect new diseases has sped up for reasons both technical and political.

First, rapid gene sequencing is now done in many laboratories.

Second, accurate symptom descriptions are instantly available. Web-based news services like ProMED, with scientist-members all over the world, issue several daily reports of outbreaks of everything from banana wilt to sheep bluetongue to human Ebola. Also, genetic sequences of new viruses are often posted on public databases, so their travels can be tracked. Scientists learned, for example, that a 2008 convention of Roman Catholic youth in Sydney, Australia, drew in influenza strains that then seeded new outbreaks all over the Northern Hemisphere.

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An image of a coronavirus, part of a family that causes the common cold and SARS. A new strain, called MERS, for Middle East respiratory syndrome, has been particularly lethal, killing half those infected.

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Uncredited/Health Protection Agency, via Associated Press

Third, and very important, countries that used to hide their outbreaks now admit them. It would be virtually impossible now, for example, to repeat what happened in Africa in the 1980s, when presidents insisted for years that no one in their countries had AIDS.

The paragon of the new transparency cited most often is China. In 2003, it was excoriated for covering up its SARS outbreak. It later dismissed many of the officials involved. Now, with H7N9, “they’re being forthright and they’re also right at the forefront of research,” said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a microbe hunter at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who just opened a partner laboratory at China’s Centers for Disease Control.

Saudi Arabia suffered a similar embarrassment in 2005, when it reacted slowly to polio spreading toward Mecca with pilgrims from northern Nigeria. Cases of paralysis ultimately reached the hills outside Mecca and from there spread briefly as far as Indonesia. Saudi Arabia now gives polio vaccines to millions of pilgrims on arrival.

Covering up an outbreak is now a violation of World Health Organization regulations adopted in the wake of SARS. The rules require members to disclose any public health event that could spread beyond their borders.

Both H7N9 and MERS fit that description. Neither is easily transmissible, though both have almost undoubtedly infected family members, nurses or hospital roommates after long exposure. Most deaths from both have been in older patients with other health problems.

More worrisome is that no one knows how these viruses first infect victims.

H7N9 is avian, a mix of genes from domestic chickens and wild waterfowl. But many Chinese H7N9 patients have had no known bird contact, and the disease has been found only rarely in birds. Unlike H5N1, it does not wipe out flocks, so it is hard to hunt. Its spread pattern is roughly circular around Shanghai, suggesting it is mostly in poultry, not migratory birds. That could change if it starts traveling in wild ducks. (Rice farmers have duck farmers drive flocks into paddies to eat the snails that eat rice shoots, and wild ducks mix with them there.)

A decade ago, H5N1 also started in China but spread west in a zigzag pattern as wild waterfowl shared Mongolian lakes in summer with species that went southwest to Eastern Europe, Egypt and Africa and were caught in storms that blew them as far as Britain.

The origins of MERS are even more baffling. Scientists assume it is from bats, because it is genetically closer to coronaviruses found in them than to SARS or to the four known human coronaviruses, which cause common colds. But while bats in Mexico, Europe and Africa have similar viruses, none have yet been found in Arabian bats or in camels, goats or other animals that might transfer it to humans.

Dr. Daszak cited Nipah virus as an example of how humans get bat diseases. It was the inspiration for the 2011 movie “Contagion,” in which Gwyneth Paltrow had vivid death and autopsy scenes. Bat feces landed on fruit eaten by pigs, and Ms. Paltrow’s character was infected when she shook the unwashed hand of a casino chef who had just cleaned out a dead pig’s mouth. (In the first real-life Nipah outbreak, in Malaysia in 1999, most victims were pig farmers and butchers.)

But another study, done in Bangladesh by a colleague of Dr. Daszak, showed that humans get Nipah directly from bats by drinking fresh date palm sap. Sap-drinking bats crawled into the collecting jugs hung in trees, drooling and urinating in them.

Small numbers of sap drinkers may have died of Nipah for decades without it being noticed, Dr. Daszak said.

Right now, doctors are relying on isolating patients and antiviral treatment with oseltamivir and zanamivir for H7N9, and ribavirin and interferon for MERS.

If either virus goes epidemic, the next step would be vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began making one against H7N9 in early April. The first of several candidates may be ready for manufacturers by the end of May, a spokeswoman said. How long it then would take to make and package millions of doses is unpredictable, she said, but should take at least six additional months.

Any vaccine for MERS will take much longer, said Mark A. Pallansch, director of the C.D.C.’s viral disease division. While flu vaccines have been produced around the world for 60 years, the passion for a coronavirus vaccine has faded since the SARS epidemic. Until recently, the most interested parties were poultry farmers, since one coronavirus kills turkeys.

Coronaviruses are unusually complex, so finding potential vaccine targets has been hard, and the extensive safety testing is expensive. Also, an animal model for testing was only recently found — macaque monkeys, in which the virus causes pneumonia.

As the scientists peered into the darkness, their headlamps revealed an eerie sight. Hundreds of eyes glinted back at them from the walls and ceiling. They had discovered, in a crumbling, long-abandoned village half-buried in sand near a remote town in southwestern Saudi Arabia, a roosting spot for bats.

It was an ideal place to set up traps.

The search for bats is part of an investigation into a deadly new viral disease that has drawn scientists from around the world to Saudi Arabia. The virus, first detected there last year, is known to have infected at least 77 people, killing 40 of them, in eight countries. The illness, called MERS, for Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, is caused by a coronavirus, a relative of the virus that caused SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which originated in China and caused an international outbreak in 2003 that infected at least 8,000 people and killed nearly 800.

As the case count climbs, critical questions about MERS remain unanswered. Scientists do not know where it came from, where the virus exists in nature, why it has appeared now, how people are being exposed to it, or whether it is becoming more contagious and could erupt into a much larger outbreak, as SARS did. The disease almost certainly originated with one or more people contracting the virus from animals — probably bats — but scientists do not know how many times that kind of spillover to humans has occurred, or how likely it is to keep happening.

There is urgency to the hunt for answers. Half the known cases have been fatal, though the real death rate is probably lower, because there almost certainly have been mild cases that have gone undetected. But the virus still worries health experts, because it can cause such severe disease and has shown an alarming ability to spread among patients in a hospital. It causes flulike symptoms that can progress to severe pneumonia.

The disease is a chilling example of what health experts call emerging infections, caused by viruses or other organisms that suddenly find their way into humans. Many of those diseases are “zoonotic,” meaning they are normally harbored by animals but somehow manage to jump species.

“As the population continues to grow, we’re bumping up against wildlife, and they happen to carry some nasty viruses we’ve never seen before,” said Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a scientific group that studies links between human health, the health of wild and domestic animals, and the environment.

Saudi Arabia has had the most patients so far (62), but cases have also originated in Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Travelers from the Arabian peninsula have taken the disease to Britain, France, Italy and Tunisia, and have infected a few people in those countries. Health experts are also worried about the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage that will draw millions of visitors to Saudi Arabia in October.

MERS has not reached the United States, but health officials have told doctors to be on the lookout for patients who get sick soon after visiting the Middle East. So far, more than 40 people in 20 states have been tested, all with negative results, according to Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of the National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The illness can be spread by coughs and sneezes, or contaminated surfaces, and people with chronic diseases seem especially vulnerable. More men than women have fallen ill, possibly because women have been protected by their veils. A cluster of cases that began in a Saudi hospital in April ultimately involved 23 people, including several family members and health workers. One man infected seven people, each of whom spread the disease to at least one other person.

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An electron microscope image of a novel coronavirus particle, also known as the MERS virus.

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National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases - Rocky Mo, via Associated Press

Regardless of where they emerge, new illnesses are just “a plane ride away,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the C.D.C.

And while MERS is not highly contagious like the flu, he said, “the likelihood of spread is not small.”

Ailing Patients Most Vulnerable

In May, Saudi health officials asked an international team of doctors to help investigate the hospital cluster. One concern was that a number of cases were in patients at a dialysis clinic, and doctors feared that dialysis machines or solutions might be spreading the disease.

“It was pretty easy to figure out that couldn’t have been the case,” said a member of the team, Dr. Connie S. Price, the chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health Medical Center.

The patients’ records did not point to dialysis as the culprit, she said, and there were clear cases of transmission in other parts of the hospital that had no connection to dialysis.

Why, then, the outbreak among dialysis patients? The answer seems to be that they were older, chronically ill and often diabetic; diabetes can suppress the immune system’s ability to fight off infections. So, when one dialysis patient contracted MERS, others who happened to be in the clinic at the same were easy targets for the virus.

“Introducing it into a dialysis center gives it the perfect environment to spread among vulnerable patients sitting in open bays for many hours,” Dr. Price said.

Some health experts have suggested that MERS, like SARS, may fade away. The SARS outbreak erupted in early 2003, but ended by that summer. Much of the success was attributed to infection control in hospitals and also to eliminating animals like civet cats, which were thought to have caught the virus from bats and to be infecting people in markets where the civets were being sold live to be killed and eaten.

But Dr. Allison McGeer, a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto who is also part of the team that studied the Saudi hospital outbreak, said there were no signs that MERS was going away.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “There are ongoing cases of disease acquired in the community. The first we know about is April 2012 in Jordan. There has been a steady and continuing number of cases.”

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Researchers with a bat captured in a remote Saudi village. The team searched areas near where cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome had been reported.

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J.H. Epstein/EcoHealth Alliance

The fact that the disease has apparently emerged in geographically disparate places, with widely scattered cases in four Middle Eastern countries, also makes Dr. McGeer doubt that it is simply going to fizzle out.

Finding out where in the environment the disease is coming from might make it possible to tell people how to avoid it. Bats are the leading suspect, because they are a reservoir of SARS and carry other coronaviruses with genetic similarities to the MERS virus. Bats could be transmitting the disease directly to people, or they might be spreading it to some other animal that then infects humans. But what kind of bat? There are 1,200 species; 20 to 30 have been identified in Saudi Arabia.

Last October, to test the theory, a team of scientists from the Saudi Ministry of Health, Columbia University and EcoHealth Alliance began scouring Saudi towns near where cases of MERS had been reported, showing people pictures of bats and asking if they had seen any. They struck pay dirt when one man led them to an abandoned village in the southwest, said to be hundreds of years old. It was there, in the inky darkness, that they found a small room that had become the roost of about 500 bats.

The scientists set up nets to catch them when they flew out at dusk to hunt insects, then spent the night testing them for the MERS virus. The bats were let go after the testing.

The animals can weigh as little as four grams (one-seventh of an ounce), and a bat that size may have an eight-inch wingspan.

“They’re mostly wing,” said Kevin J. Olival, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance. “They’re little flying fur balls.”

It takes about 15 minutes to process a bat — to weigh and measure it, swab it for saliva and feces samples, and collect some blood and a tiny plug of skin from a wing for DNA testing to confirm its species. The specimens were then frozen and sent to the laboratory of Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a leading expert on viruses at Columbia.

Bats do not much appreciate all this medical attention. They bite, and in addition to potentially carrying MERS, they may harbor rabies and other viruses.

“You’re wearing coveralls that cover everything — hoods, gloves, respirators, booties,” Dr. Lipkin said. “You’re all dressed, so you don’t have any contact with the animals. It’s night, but still very hot.”

Hundreds of bats have been tested, he said, but it is too soon to disclose the results.

From Animals to Humans

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Dr Jonathan H. Epstein, left, and Dr. Kevin J. Olival in the room where they set a trap for the bats.

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V. Kapoor/Columbia University

The team has also tested camels, goats, sheep and cats, which might act as intermediate hosts, picking up the virus from bats and then infecting people. One reason for suspecting camels is that a MERS patient from the United Arab Emirates had been around a sick camel shortly before falling ill. But that animal was not tested.

“If animals are acting as a reservoir, getting people sick, how would this happen?” asked Dr. Jonathan H. Epstein, a veterinary epidemiologist with EcoHealth Alliance.

If animals harbor the virus, does it make them ill? Do they infect people by coughing? Or do they pass the virus in urine or feces, and infect people who clean their stalls? The answers do not come easily.

“Camels are tough, let me tell you,” said Dr. Epstein. “They’re ornery. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to wrangle a camel. They’re strong, they’re fast, they bite really hard.”

The trick, he said, is to get the camel into a position that veterinarians call “ventral recumbency,” or lying on its belly. A very feisty camel may also have its legs tied together so it cannot run away or kick anybody. Then someone steadies its head, maybe with a harness, and holds its jaws open so a vet can reach in and out quickly with a cotton swab.

“They have a pretty big mouth,” Dr. Epstein said. “You try not to get bitten.”

So far, he said, “none of the animals we looked at were overtly sick.”

But Dr. Lipkin noted that the virus tests on livestock samples were not complete. Any specimens from such animals from other countries are considered a threat to agriculture in the United States because they could carry foot-and-mouth disease or other pathogens, and have to be screened first by the Agriculture Department before being released to research labs.

Testing may identify animal species that carry the virus, but that will not immediately explain why it has emerged now.

“The most common reason that wildlife viruses make the jump into people is that we do things that bring us and our livestock into closer contact with wildlife, such as the wildlife trade or agricultural intensification,” Dr. Epstein said.

And, said his colleague Dr. Olival, finding the animals that carry the disease is “not just an academic exercise.”

“It’s a way to inform public health measures,” he said, “to try to stop zoonotic diseases before they emerge into humans.”

See you tonight at the Cosmos Club, our event will begin with a cocktail reception at 6:00 pm on the second floor in the Grand Room.

Dr. Peter Daszak and the scientists of EcoHealth Alliance cordially invite you and a guest to a cocktail reception & presentation

GLOBAL HEALTH SECURITY

with special guest: The Honorable Andrew C. Weber, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs, U.S. Department of Defense

also presenting:

Dr. Peter Daszak, President, EcoHealth Alliance

Dr. Nicholas Preston, Director of Data Science and Research Technology, EcoHealth Alliance

Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2013 ; Cocktail Reception: 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm ; Presentations: 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Cosmos Club 2121 Massachusetts Avenue, NW - 2nd floor, Washington, DC 20008

About Peter Daszak, PhD

• Dr. Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, is a leader in the field of conservation medicine and a respected disease ecologist. EcoHealth Alliance is a global organization dedicated to innovative conservation science linking ecology and the health of humans and wildlife. EcoHealth Alliance's mission is to provide scientists and educators with support for grassroots conservation efforts in 20 high-biodiversity countries in North America, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.Previous to his current position, Dr. Daszak was the Executive Director of EcoHealth Alliance's Consortium for Conservation Medicine (CCM) - a collaborative think-tank of institutions. Dr. Daszak's research has been instrumental in revealing and predicting the impacts of emerging diseases on wildlife, livestock, and human populations. Dr. Daszak has also consulted for other non-profit organizations and governmental agencies such as the OIE ad hoc working group on amphibian diseases, the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Department of the Interior, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, National Institutes of Health, Australian Biosecurity CRC, DIVERSITAS, Society for Conservation Biology, and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Dr. Daszak has been called upon time and again to advise governmental, commercial, and non-commercial organizations including, NASA and leading pharmaceutical companies on issues ranging from the environment to national security. With an impressive track record of more than 100 peer-reviewed published papers, Dr. Daszak has also authored book chapters, and his research has been featured in such publications as Nature, Science, The Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Dr. Daszak's work has been the focus of extensive media coverage, including articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, TIME and broadcast appearances on 60 Minutes II, CNN, ABC News, NPR's Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, and BBC News.

About The Honorable Andrew C. Weber

• The Honorable Andrew C. Weber is the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics for matters concerning nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs. As the ASD(NCB), his mission is to prevent, protect against, and respond to these global threats. Mr. Weber is the Staff Director of the Nuclear Weapons Council, which manages the nuclear weapons stockpile, and he oversees the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. Since taking office, Mr. Weber has overseen an expansion of Nunn-Lugar programs into new regions, including Africa and South Asia. He has also been a key player in reforming the nation's medical countermeasures enterprise. His nuclear duties include executing President Obama's direction that as the U.S. reduces the number of deployed weapons; we are assured that the remaining stockpile is safe, secure, and effective. Prior to his appointment by President Obama, Mr. Weber served for 13 years as an Adviser for Threat Reduction Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He played a key role in Nunn-Lugar operations to remove weapons grade uranium from Kazakhstan and Georgia, and nuclear capable MiG-29 aircraft from Moldova. Mr. Weber also developed and oversaw the Department of Defense Biological Threat Reduction Program. For his work at the Department of Defense, Mr. Weber has twice been awarded the Exceptional Civilian Service Medal. Most of Mr. Weber's 26 years of public service have been dedicated to reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction. He served previously as a United States Foreign Service Officer, with diplomatic assignments in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Hong Kong. From 2002 through 2008 Mr. Weber taught a course on Force & Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh Graduate School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has a Master of Science in Foreign Service degree from Georgetown and is a graduate of Cornell University. Mr. Weber speaks Russian and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

About Nicholas Preston, PhD

• Dr. Nicholas 'Nico' Preston is the Director of Data Science and Research Technology (DART) at EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). His research in computational disease ecology (a blend of ecology, computing, and health) combines data mining, web technology, and statistical modeling to assess infectious disease threats to human, animal, and ecosystem health. Through emerging web technologies and cloud computing, Dr. Preston builds complex computer models and biosurveillance platforms to monitor global ecosystems and understand how they respond to human impacts. Dr. Preston is currently exploring global media and field data to identify new diseases, pathogens, or environmental risks. Dr. Preston's doctoral training was in ecosystem ecology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison Center for Limnology (CFL), with a certificate in global health and postdoctoral work in global health informatics at the UW-Madison Global Health Institute (GHI) and Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). His postdoctoral work on HealthScapes, and underlying dotSkapes technology, has continued at EHA through web platforms designed to support and enhance collaborative global environmental health research. Nico founded the DART lab at EHA - a dynamic team of data scientists and software developers that draw upon interdisciplinary backgrounds in ecology, computer science, and health. The lab is developing flagship projects, such as the Sicki web encyclopedia, to pinpoint the origins of infectious diseases by curating and analyzing historic disease media through dynamic web applications. Sicki builds upon EHA's expertise in developing 'hotspot' maps of infectious diseases. This historic perspective from Sicki informs our field programs and virtual biosurveillance laboratories. The next generation of technology being developed combines recommendation engines, adaptive models, and decision support tools to monitor, detect, and diagnose emerging threats in real-time dashboards for analysts. [...]

A new study suggests that camels are the major source of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, a viral disease that has sickened 182 people and killed 79 of them since it was first detected in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

The animals are most likely to infect people through respiratory secretions — from coughing, sneezing, snorting or spitting — that travel through the air or cling to surfaces.

People with chronic illnesses like diabetes, lung disease or kidney failure, or other conditions that weaken their immunity, seem to be most susceptible, and should avoid close contact with camels, researchers say.

Saudi Arabia has had the most cases, other Middle Eastern countries have had a few and a handful of travelers from that region have taken the disease to Europe. There have been no cases in the United States. Although people have infected one another, the disease is not highly transmissible among humans, so researchers say that unless the virus changes to become more contagious in people, the risk of global spread does not seem high.

The new study provides the first evidence that the virus is widespread in dromedary camels (the kind with one hump) in Saudi Arabia, and has been for at least 20 years.

Younger animals are more likely than older ones to be infected and contagious. The virus invades the camels’ nose and respiratory tract, but does not kill them. It is not known whether it even makes them sick.

“It would be very difficult to know if they were ill, since these are creatures that slobber a great deal,” said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, the senior author of the study and a virus expert at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York. The results, by researchers from Saudi Arabia and the United States, were published on Tuesday in mBio, an online journal.

Tests on 203 dromedaries from different parts of Saudi Arabia found evidence of past infection in about 75 percent overall, with higher rates in some regions. About 35 percent of young animals and 15 percent of adults had current infections, with significant variations by region. In addition, measurements of stored blood samples from camels indicate that MERS or a virus closely related to it has been present in the animals since at least 1992.

Genetically, the virus found in camels matches samples from infected humans.

The disease was not detected in people until 2012. It is not known whether the cases in humans are a new phenomenon, or whether they have been occurring but were not recognized. Some people develop mild respiratory infections, but in others the disease turns deadly, with worsening fever, cough and shortness of breath.

In some cases, patients were known to have been around camels, but until recently it was not clear whether the animals might be the source. Other cases have been complete mysteries, with no known exposure to animals or ill humans. Sick people have infected family members, health workers and nearby patients in the hospital, but the virus is not considere