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 considered highly contagious among humans.

Researchers do not know how camels become infected, but they suspect that the virus may have originally come from bats. MERS belongs to the coronavirus family, like SARS, the deadly and more contagious respiratory infection that began in China and caused a global outbreak in 2003. Bats are a host for SARS and other coronaviruses, and studies have found evidence linking MERS to bats.

But at this point the evidence linking people and camels is stronger.

“This is an issue for Saudi Arabia,” said Peter Daszak, an author of the study and the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a group that studies the links between human and animal health. “Camels are highly valuable livestock, traded internationally. Unfortunately, they have an endemic virus that can cause death in people.”

Camels are sold for meat and milk in the Middle East. There are also racing camels, and prized “beauty camels” that compete in pageants and have fetched prices of $1 million or more.

Dr. Lipkin and Dr. Daszak said it was not immediately obvious how to protect people who come into contact with camels, like farmers, breeders and slaughterhouse workers. But they said animals can be quickly and cheaply tested for the virus, and those with current infections could be quarantined and not sold or transported.

Dr. Lipkin said MERS in camels may be analogous to the many respiratory infections that children catch early in life and then become immune to. In camels, once tests no longer find the active infection, the risk of transmitting the disease is probably greatly reduced or even gone, Dr. Lipkin said.

He also said it may be possible to develop a vaccine to prevent the disease in camels. But he said creating a vaccine for people would not make sense, given that so far, MERS is rare.

Saudi Arabia imports many camels, from other countries in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia. Dr. Lipkin said studies should be done in those countries, or in animals being imported, to try to find out where MERS is coming from, in hopes of eliminating it.

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — As the virus tore through the city’s largest hospital, jumping from bed to bed and afflicting scores of people, terror filled the wards.

Some doctors and nurses refused to treat the sick or stopped coming to work altogether. Patients panicked. One surgeon recalled a man with a broken limb trying to flee the emergency room so he would not catch it, too.

“Everyone was afraid,” the surgeon, Dr. Mohammed Ahmed, said of the spike in cases this spring.

It was the darkest hour since the new illness, known as Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, first appeared in Saudi Arabia late in 2012. In all, more than 700 cases have been documented in 20 countries, nearly all of them linked to Saudi Arabia. More than 250 people have died.

The sudden spread of a mysterious and fatal new virus is reminiscent of the early days of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, a related disease that appeared in dozens of countries and killed more than 770 people, principally in Asia in 2003.

MERS circulates most heavily in a region that is the nexus for Islam. This port city, Jidda, is the arrival point for most of the two million to three million pilgrims who make the hajj to Mecca each year. Riyadh, the Saudi capital, has had the second-largest outbreak after Jidda, and cases have also appeared in Mecca. The hajj will not take place until October, but many Muslims travel to Mecca during the holy month of Ramadan, which most Muslims began observing on Sunday. And off-season pilgrims have already spread the disease to Iran, Jordan and Algeria.

Saudi officials know how urgently they need to beat the disease, and they say they now have the latest outbreak under control. But the fact that the number of cases and deaths has more than tripled since the end of 2013 has led health experts to cite grave flaws in the way this ultraconservative and staunchly private monarchy has handled the crisis.

King Abdullah fired the country’s health minister and his deputy in April, leaving experts wondering whether the shake-up would bring greater transparency and international cooperation. “In the U.S., when you have a crisis like the Veterans Administration scandal, the new head is in front of the TV cameras explaining what the new plan is,” said Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a veterinary organization that tracked the disease in animals. “There is no tradition of openness in Saudi Arabia.”

A World Health Organization panel said this month that the surge in cases that began in April had fallen off, but that “the situation remains serious” and that hospital outbreaks should be investigated for breaches in safety protocols.

“I am not saying we’re not worried, but this is something that can be controlled,” said Hanan Balkhy, executive director for infection prevention and control at Saudi Arabia’s National Guard hospitals. “If this were Ebola, I would go the king myself and tell him, ‘We need to isolate the kingdom.' ”

Both SARS and MERS are coronaviruses, named for their shapes. Both are thought to have originated in bats and then spread through other animals to people. But while SARS circulated in obscure forest animals like palm civets that are eaten in southern China, MERS infects camels, which are common in the Middle East. MERS seems to jump more easily to humans, possibly in raw camel milk, but it spreads less readily between people than SARS did.

One theory gaining popularity is that MERS cases peak in the spring because camel calves are born at that time. So until a human or veterinary vaccine is developed, people in contact with camels must be careful, especially in the spring.

Yet the outbreak this year suggested that lapses in the kingdom’s health system played a bigger role in spreading the virus than camels did. Most of the hundreds of new infections were linked to hospitals, dialysis clinics or other health facilities, and many were among staff members. Two health workers from Saudi clinics were hospitalized in Indiana and Florida.

The greatest number of new cases was at King Fahd Hospital in Jidda. Doctors said a mix of bad management, crowding and lax hygiene helped spread the virus there.

The outbreak came during the busiest time of year, when many Saudis were on vacation, leading to more car accidents, sports injuries and other mishaps, doctors said. New emergency patients were registered in a crowded area, and hospital rooms meant for four people often held 12.

Suspected MERS cases were not always identified and isolated, and patients unwittingly spread the virus around the hospital — one in the cardiac ward, and another among dialysis patients, according to Dr. Ahmed Ragab, chief of the hospital’s intensive-care unit.

“If one patient came in with the virus, all the others would get it, because they were all next to each other,” Dr. Ragab said.

Some medical staff members were lax with sanitary measures, not wearing masks or infrequently sanitizing their hands. Many fell ill.

When the king fired the health minister, Abdullah al-Rabeeah, in April, he gave the job to the labor minister, Adel Fakieh, who is known for bypassing the kingdom’s bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. Mr. Fakieh enlisted McKinsey & Company, the corporate consulting firm, and opened a command center in Jidda to track cases.

The changes at the top soon filtered down to King Fahd Hospital, where Dr. Imad al-Jahdali became director in May.

Image

A man with a surgical mask in Jidda, a focal point for MERS.

Credit...

Mohamed Alhwaity/Reuters

“The scene at the time was panic, from the public and from the media,” Dr. Jahdali recalled. “King Fahd Hospital was the spotlight for everything.”

He divided the hospital in two, with one half exclusively for MERS patients. Anyone with a fever and breathing problems is quickly isolated for testing.

The disease has been surrounded by controversy since it came to light, when an Egyptian microbiologist, Ali Mohammed Zaki, sent a sample from a Jidda hospital to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. Dutch researchers patented the new virus and named it after their center, enraging Saudi officials, who considered the action intellectual property theft. They fired Dr. Zaki and petitioned the W.H.O. for a new name for the virus.

Scientists from 18 universities or health agencies in eight countries were recruited to work on the virus. Egos began clashing, especially as teams raced to publish results. Two rivals published the genomes of viruses from the same patient and his camel in separate academic journals.

Some researchers accused the Saudi deputy minister of health, Ziad Memish, of duplicity and bad management, saying he hampered progress, while others said he was made a fall guy for an outbreak beyond his control.

Dr. Memish, described recently in The Lancet, the British medical journal, as “the father of mass gatherings medicine” for his work on protecting pilgrims, denied accusations that he took credit for the work of others or kept sloppy records. But he acknowledged occasionally switching cooperation from one team to another, bruising feelings.

“Some collaborations began and prospered; some did not,” Dr. Memish said by email. “That’s the way science and life progresses, sometimes.”

One recent afternoon, a family brought an old woman with a nasty cough to King Fahd Hospital. She was immediately wheeled into an isolation room. Dr. Jahdali watched proudly as health workers blocked her relatives from following, so they would not get sick. Confirmed cases go to a special wing where rooms with tight sliding glass doors hold one patient each and nurses wear gloves and snug-fitting masks.

Whether Saudi Arabia can get the virus under control will depend, experts said, on how effectively such measures can be applied nationally — not an easy task in a country of long distances and weak government oversight of some health centers.

The number of new cases reported nationally appears to be falling, with about 200 in May and only 27 since then, the Health Ministry said.

“The most direct cause of this improvement — after, of course, the blessing of Allah — is the stringent implementation of infection control in hospitals,” said Tariq Madani, who heads the Health Ministry’s MERS task force.

"The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research."

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

[ LINK to the paper : [HP006L][GDrive]  : "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence" ]

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.

In October 2013, the US government put a stop to all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement (see below...)   at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”

Baric’s study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.

The debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, told Nature.

But Baric and others argued the study’s importance. “[The results] move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced  today that the U.S. government will undertake a deliberative process to assess the risks and benefits of certain gain-of-function (GOF) experiments with influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses in order to develop a new Federal policy regarding the funding of this research. During this deliberative process, U.S. government agencies will institute a pause on the funding of any new studies involving these experiments. For purposes of the deliberative process and this funding pause, “GOF studies” refers to scientific research that increases the ability of any of these infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets.

NIH has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts. These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better. NIH will be adhering to this funding pause until the robust and broad deliberative process described by the White House — including consultation with the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) and input from the National Research Council of the National Academies — is completed.

During this pause, NIH will not provide new funding for any projects involving these experiments and encourages those currently conducting this type of work — whether federally funded or not — to voluntarily pause their research while the government determines how to proceed.

Public involvement in this deliberative process is key, and the process is thus designed to be transparent, accessible, and open to input from all sources. Consultation with the NSABB, the first step in this process, will take place October 22, and I encourage you to follow these deliberations closely.

Biosketches of Invited Speakers and Facilitators

• [...]

• Peter Daszak, Ph.D., is President of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-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 impact of emerging diseases across the globe. His achievements include identifying the bat origin of SARS, identifying the underlying drivers of Nipah and Hendra virus emergence, producing the first ever global emerging disease “hotspots” map, identifying the first case of a species extinction due to disease, coining the term “pathogen pollution,” and discovering the disease chytridiomycosis as the cause of global amphibian declines. Dr. Daszak is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats, the Academies Advisory Committee to the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the Supervisory Board of the One Health Platform, the One Health Commission Council of Advisors, and the Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases (CEEZAD) External Advisory Board. He has served on the Institue of Medicine (IOM) committee on global surveillance for emerging zoonoses, the National Research Council (NRC) committee on the future of veterinary research, the International Standing Advisory Board of the Australian Biosecurity CRC; and has advised the Director for Medical Preparedness Policy on the White House National Security Staff on global health issues. Dr. Daszak won the 2000 CSIRO medal for collaborative research on the discovery of amphibian chytridiomycosis, is the EHA institutional lead for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats-PREDICT and PREDICT-2, is on the editorial board of Conservation Biology and Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ecohealth. He has authored more than 200 scientific papers, and his work has been the focus of extensive media coverage, ranging from popular press articles to television appearances.

• [...]

High in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, an international team of researchers set out four buckets to gather a shower of viruses falling from the sky.

Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel. Very little is known about this realm, and that’s why the number of deposited viruses stunned the team in Spain. Each day, they calculated, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.

Most of the globe-trotting viruses are swept into the air by sea spray, and lesser numbers arrive in dust storms.

“Unimpeded by friction with the surface of the Earth, you can travel great distances, and so intercontinental travel is quite easy” for viruses, said Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia. “It wouldn’t be unusual to find things swept up in Africa being deposited in North America.”

The study by Dr. Suttle and his colleagues, published earlier this year in the International Society of Microbial Ecology Journal, was the first to count the number of viruses falling onto the planet. The research, though, is not designed to study influenza or other illnesses, but to get a better sense of the “virosphere,” the world of viruses on the planet.

Generally it’s assumed these viruses originate on the planet and are swept upward, but some researchers theorize that viruses actually may originate in the atmosphere. (There is a small group of researchers who believe viruses may even have come here from outer space, an idea known as panspermia.)

Whatever the case, viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet by far. While Dr. Suttle’s team found hundreds of millions of viruses in a square meter, they counted tens of millions of bacteria in the same space.

Mostly thought of as infectious agents, viruses are much more than that. It’s hard to overstate the central role that viruses play in the world: They’re essential to everything from our immune system to our gut microbiome, to the ecosystems on land and sea, to climate regulation and the evolution of all species. Viruses contain a vast diverse array of unknown genes — and spread them to other species.

Last year, three experts called for a new initiative to better understand viral ecology, especially as the planet changes. “Viruses modulate the function and evolution of all living things,” wrote Matthew B. Sullivan of Ohio State, Joshua Weitz of Georgia Tech, and Steven W. Wilhelm of the University of Tennessee. “But to what extent remains a mystery.”

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Viruses reproduce by attaching to a bacterium and injecting their own genes. Ancient viral DNA eventually became part of the nervous system of modern humans, playing a role in consciousness, nerve communication and memory formation.

Credit...

Biozentrum, University of Basel/Science Source

Do viruses even fit the definition of something alive? While they are top predators of the microbial world, they lack the ability to reproduce and so must take over the cell of a host — called an infection — and use its machinery to replicate. The virus injects its own DNA into the host; sometimes those new genes are useful to the host and become part of its genome.

Researchers recently identified an ancient virus that inserted its DNA into the genomes of four-limbed animals that were human ancestors. That snippet of genetic code, called ARC, is part of the nervous system of modern humans and plays a role in human consciousness — nerve communication, memory formation and higher-order thinking. Between 40 percent and 80 percent of the human genome may be linked to ancient viral invasions.

Viruses and their prey are also big players in the world’s ecosystems. Much research now is aimed at factoring their processes into our understanding of how the planet works.

“If you could weigh all the living material in the oceans, 95 percent of it is stuff is you can’t see, and they are responsible for supplying half the oxygen on the planet,” Dr. Suttle said.

In laboratory experiments, he has filtered viruses out of seawater but left their prey, bacteria. When that happens, plankton in the water stop growing. That’s because when preying viruses infect and take out one species of microbe — they are very specific predators — they liberate nutrients in them, such as nitrogen, that feed other species of bacteria. In the same way, an elk killed by a wolf becomes food for ravens, coyotes and other species. As plankton grow, they take in carbon dioxide and create oxygen.

One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily.

Viruses help keep ecosystems in balance by changing the composition of microbial communities. As toxic algae blooms spread in the ocean, for example, they are brought to heel by a virus that attacks the algae and causes it to explode and die, ending the outbreak in as little as a day.

While some viruses and other organisms have evolved together and have achieved a kind of balance, an invasive virus can cause rapid, widespread changes and even lead to extinction.

West Nile virus has changed the composition of bird communities in much of the United States, killing crows and favoring ravens, some researchers say. Multiple extinctions of birds in Hawaii are predicted as the mosquito-borne avipoxvirus spreads into mountain forests where it was once too cold for mosquitoes to live.

When species disappear, the changes can ripple through an ecosystem. A textbook example is a viral disease called rinderpest.

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An engraving showing a cattle inspection at a market in 19th century London, when rinderpest, a viral disease, was rampant in Europe and Africa, wiping out some herds entirely.

Credit...

Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty Images

The Italian army brought a few cattle into North Africa, and in 1887 the virus took off across the continent, killing a broad range of cloven-hoofed animals from Eritrea to South Africa — in some cases wiping out 95 percent of the herds.

“It infected antelope, it infected wildebeest and other large grazers across the whole ecosystem,” said Peter Daszak, the president of Ecohealth Alliance, which is working on a global project to catalog viruses likely to pass from animals to humans.

“The impact was not just on the animals. But because they are primary grazers and they died off in huge numbers, vegetation was impacted, and it allowed trees to grow where they would have been grazed away,” he said.

“The large acacia trees on the plains of Africa are all the same age and were seedlings when rinderpest first came in and the wildlife died,” Dr. Daszak said. In other places, far less grazing created a hospitable habitat for the tsetse fly, which carries the parasites that cause sleeping sickness.

“These kinds of ecological changes can last for centuries or even millennia,” Dr. Daszak said.

Combined with drought, large numbers of people died from starvation as rinderpest spread. An explorer in 1891 estimated two-thirds of the Masai people, who depended on cattle, were killed.

“Almost instantaneously, rinderpest swept away the wealth of tropical Africa,” wrote John Reader in his book “Africa: A Biography of a Continent.”

With intensive vaccinations, rinderpest was completely wiped out, not only in Africa but globally in 2011.

The beneficial effects of viruses are much less known, especially among plants. “There are huge questions in wild systems about what viruses are doing there,” said Marilyn Roossinck, who studies viral ecology in plants at Pennsylvania State University. “We have never found deleterious effects from a virus in the wild.”

A grass found in the high-temperature soils of Yellowstone’s geothermal areas, for example, needs a fungus to grow in the extreme environment. In turn, the fungus needs a virus.

Tiny spots of virus on the plant that yields quinoa is also important for the plant’s survival. “Little spots of virus confer drought tolerance but don’t cause disease,” she said. “It changes the whole plant physiology.”

“Viruses aren’t our enemies,” Dr. Suttle said. “Certain nasty viruses can make you sick, but it’s important to recognize that viruses and other microbes out there are absolutely integral for the ecosystem.”

Mice that live in the basements of New York City apartment buildings — even at the most exclusive addresses — carry disease-causing bacteria, antibiotic-resistant bugs and viruses that have never been seen before, a new study from Columbia University finds.

Researchers collected feces from more than 400 mice captured over a year in eight buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. The team then analyzed the droppings for bacteria and viruses.

The viruses included nine species that had never been seen before and others that have not been known to cause human disease, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal mBio.

But in a second study focused on bacteria, the researchers detected some of the most recognizable disease-causing pathogens, including Shigella, Salmonella, Clostridium difficile and E. coli. The scientists also found antibiotic-resistant bacteria like those that have become nearly untreatable at area hospitals.

It’s unclear whether the bacteria on the mice pose any health threat to people or have caused any human disease. But for centuries, rodents have been linked to illnesses like the Black Death.

“They are a potential source of human infection,” said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, the epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia who was the senior author on the study. “The real message is that these things are everywhere.”

The mice appeared to be healthy, and Dr. Lipkin said he presumes that they are carriers of the bacteria but are not affected by them.

Dr. Lipkin said it was not clear whether the mice were getting the antibiotic-resistant bacteria from people — say, by eating food contaminated with the feces of someone taking antibiotics — or whether the bacteria developed resistance after mice ate discarded antibiotics.

It would be nearly impossible to conduct research directly linking a mouse pathogen with a human disease, said Charles Calisher, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University, who was not involved in the new studies.

The source of patients’ infections are rarely investigated, and they are not usually asked about their contact with mice, he said. “These are not simple things to investigate,” Dr. Calisher said.

Peter Daszak, who heads the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that researches emerging diseases around the world, also described the research as difficult.

It’s crucial to identify and trace these microbes, he said, to help understand how they are transmitted and how, if necessary, to protect ourselves from the diseases they may carry.

“If we don’t know where they originate, we can’t identify what’s driving them and then we can’t control it,” said Dr. Daszak, who was not involved in the research.

No one knows, for example, whether antibiotic resistance genes emerged in hospitals, in cities or in rural areas.

This research is particularly important to do in New York, Dr. Daszak said, because the city is a destination for people from all corners of the world.

“New York is a major at-risk place for pathogens,” he said. “We’re certainly on the front line for emerging diseases.”

He said that the new research should not make New Yorkers more fearful of mice. “I’m not worried personally,” said Dr. Daszak, who lives in suburban Rockland County but works in the city. “Luckily, this is a species we’re already trying to control.”

Dr. Lipkin began researching New York City’s natural pathogens after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when scientists realized they did not have a baseline to compare any changes. His lab has also studied rats on the New York City subway system and found many of the same infectious bacteria.

Although it is impossible to completely get rid of urban mice, Dr. Lipkin said his study suggests that more should be done to control mouse populations and their interactions with people.

Large apartment buildings should fill any gaps in their foundations, and trap and control any rodents found indoors, Dr. Calisher said.

Should everybody get a cat? “Cats have their own viruses,” Dr. Calisher noted.

In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X”: We were referring to the next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population. 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.

Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status.

In a nutshell, Covid-19 is Disease X.

Even as there are signs that the epidemic’s spread might be slowing in China, multiple communities and countries have now reported sustained transmission in their midst. The number of confirmed cases has exploded in South Korea in recent days. In Italy, villages and towns are on lockdown, Fashion Week in Milan has been disrupted and festivals are being canceled while public health authorities search for patient zero to identify who else is likely infected and may spread the disease in Europe. Iran appears to have become a new hub of transmission. The looming pandemic will challenge us in new ways, as people try to evade quarantines, and misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theorists ply their trade in open democracies.

But as the world struggles to respond to Covid-19, we risk missing the really big picture: Pandemics are on the rise, and we need to contain the process that drives them, not just the individual diseases.

Plagues are not only part of our culture; they are caused by it. The Black Death spread into Europe in the mid-14th century with the growth of trade along the Silk Road. New strains of influenza have emerged from livestock farming. Ebola, SARS, MERS and now Covid-19 have been linked to wildlife. Pandemics usually begin as viruses in animals that jump to people when we make contact with them.

These spillovers are increasing exponentially as our ecological footprint brings us closer to wildlife in remote areas and the wildlife trade brings these animals into urban centers. Unprecedented road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development, as well as globalized travel and trade, make us supremely susceptible to pathogens like coronaviruses.

Yet the world’s strategy for dealing with pandemics is woefully inadequate. Across the board, from politicians to the public, we treat pandemics as a disaster-response issue: We wait for them to happen and hope a vaccine or drug can be developed quickly in their aftermath. But even as Covid-19 rages, there still is no vaccine available for the SARS virus of 2002-3, nor for HIV/AIDS or Zika or a host of emerging pathogens. The problem is that between outbreaks, the will to spend money on prevention wanes, and the market for vaccines and drugs against sporadic viral diseases isn’t enough to drive research and development.

During its World Health Assembly in 2016, the W.H.O. set up the R&D Blueprint to bridge this gap and announced a priority list of pathogens that most threaten global health and for which no vaccines or drugs were in the pipeline. SARS made the list, as did MERS, Nipah, Ebola and other rare but serious diseases caused by epidemic viruses. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness

Innovations — a global partnership between public, private, philanthropic and civil society organizations launched at Davos in 2017 — stepped up to the plate and sourced funding to develop vaccines and therapeutics against some of these.

To escape from the Age of Pandemics, we’ll need to treat them as a public health issue and start working on prevention in addition to responses. Our first goal should be to broaden our armory against potential mass epidemics. When some of us added “Disease X” to the W.H.O.’s priority list two years ago, we wanted to make the point that it’s not sufficient to develop vaccines and drugs for known agents when the next big one is likely to be a different pathogen — a virus close to SARS, say, but not close enough that the same vaccine can work against both.

As Covid-19 strikes today and a spate of other pathogens are ready to emerge in the future, we continue to butt up against nature.

Scientists estimate that there are 1.67 million unknown viruses of the type that have previously emerged in people. Discovering and sequencing them should be a priority — a simple case of “know your enemy.” In the aftermath of SARS, research on coronaviruses originating in bats has discovered more than 50 related viruses, some of which have the potential to infect people; this information can now be used to test for broad-action vaccines and drugs. Scaling up this effort to cover all viral families, as the Global Virome Project proposes to do, is a logical first step toward prevention.

A radical shift is also needed in the way that tests, vaccines and drugs are designed so that entire groups of pathogens are targeted instead of individual pathogens that are already known. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States is working on a universal flu vaccine that would cover all known strains of influenza; a universal coronavirus vaccine, an Ebola-virus vaccine and others will also be needed.

With a smaller investment, we can also try to get ahead of pandemics by working with communities in hot spots of emerging diseases. Disease surveillance should be focused on farmers, rural communities and anyone who has extensive contact with wildlife, to look for unusual illnesses, test for novel pathogens and work with people to develop alternatives to high-risk activities such as the wildlife trade.

Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.

Peter Daszak is a disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth Alliance, in New York.

Peter Daszak is a scientist whose work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure. So why did the president just cancel Daszak’s funding? It’s the kind of politics which might seem ill-advised in a Health & Fitness crisis. President Trump is blaming China’s government for the pandemic. The outbreak was first detected in the city of Wuhan. The administration has said, at times, the virus is man-made or that, if it’s natural, it must have leaked out of a Chinese government lab. Both the White House and the Chinese Communist Party have been less than honest. And so, in China, and the U.S., the work of scientists like Peter Daszak is being undercut by pandemic politics.

Why it matters that the NIH cancelled a coronavirus research grant

Peter Daszak is a British-born American Ph.D. who’s spent a career discovering dangerous viruses in wildlife, especially bats.

In 2003, in Malaysia, he warned 60 Minutes a pandemic was coming. 

Peter Daszak in 2003 interview: What worries me the most is that we are going to miss the next emerging disease, that we’re suddenly going to find a SARS virus that moves from one part of the planet to another, wiping out people as it moves along.

In the 17 years since that prophecy, Peter Daszak became president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance.

Peter Daszak: We’re a nonprofit research organization that focuses on understanding where the pandemics come from, what’s the risk of future pandemics and can we get in between this pandemic and the next one and disrupt it and stop it.

In China, EcoHealth has worked for 15 years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Together they’ve catalogued hundreds of bat viruses, research that is critical right now. 

Peter Daszak: The breakthrough drug, Remdesivir, that seems to have some impact on COVID-19 was actually tested against the viruses we discovered under our NIH research funding.

Scott Pelley: And so that testing would not have been possible–

Peter Daszak: No, it would not.

Scott Pelley: –if it hadn’t been for the work that you did with the NIH grant?

Peter Daszak: Correct. 

But his funding from the NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health & Fitness, was killed, two weeks ago, by a political disinformation campaign targeting China’s Wuhan Institute.

On April 14, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed China’s Wuhan Institute had, quote, “birthed a monster.” Gaetz is a vigorous defender of the president. He’s been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly threatening a witness against Mr. Trump and he led a protest to delay impeachment testimony. 

Matt Gaetz on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.

There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab. But, the falsehood spread like a virus, in the White House, and without verification, in the briefing room. 

Reporter in White House press briefing: There’s also another report that the NIH, under the Obama administration, in 2015 gave that lab $3.7 million in a grant. Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?

President Trump: The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million? I’ve been hearing about that. And we’ve instructed that if any grants are going to that area – we’re looking at it, literally, about an hour ago, and also early in the morning. We will end that grant very quickly. 

That grant was to Peter Daszak’s U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance for disease prevention it does throughout the world. His work was considered so important that, last year, the grant was reauthorized and increased by the Trump administration.

Why it matters that the NIH canceled a coronavirus research grant

Daszak had been spending about $100,000 a year collaborating with the Wuhan lab. 

Peter Daszak: I can’t just show up in China and say, “Hi, I wanna work on your viruses.” I have to do this through the correct channels. So, what we do is we talk to NIH, and they approve the people we can work with in China. And that happened. And our collaboration with Wuhan was preapproved by NIH. 

Scott Pelley: What is the theory of the work that you’ve done with the Wuhan lab?

Peter Daszak: Well, the idea is that we know that viruses that affect people and pandemics tend to come from wildlife. So, our strategy is to go to the wildlife source, find out where the viruses are, and try and shift behaviors like hunting and killing wildlife that would lead to the next outbreak. We also get the information into vaccine and drug developers so they can design better drugs.

The Wuhan Institute is internationally respected. Two years ago, a team from the U.S. Embassy visited. That team sent a cable to Washington, concerned that one lab in the complex had a serious shortage of trained investigators. But the cable, first reported by the Washington Post, emphasized the Wuhan Institute is “critical to future… outbreak prediction and prevention.” EcoHealth’s work with Wuhan ended one week after Mr. Trump’s briefing room pledge, when the NIH revoked the grant.

Scott Pelley: They gave you no reason?

Peter Daszak: They said it was canceled for convenience and it doesn’t fit within the scope of NIH’s priorities right now.

Scott Pelley: And yet it was a high priority when the grant was reissued in 2019?

Peter Daszak: Yeah it’s definitely puzzling. I mean, this grant received an incredibly high-priority score. It was in the top 3% of grants they reviewed. And that’s unusual.

Maureen Miller: I was shocked. I was really, really surprised. 

Maureen Miller is a Ph.D. epidemiologist at Columbia University who has collaborated with EcoHealth and Wuhan. 

Maureen Miller: It stops the research that’s essential to understanding where pandemics like the one we’re going through, where they start. 

Scott Pelley: How often are NIH grants terminated in this way?

Maureen Miller: This is the first one I’ve ever heard of. When they terminate an NIH grant, and it’s not something that’s usually taken lightly, it is for cause. There’s fraud involved at some level. There is either manipulation of the data, you’re putting your participants in harm’s way, or your data are fraudulent. 

Scott Pelley: And none of those things have been alleged with EcoHealth?

Maureen Miller: Absolutely not. None.

The National Institutes of Health & Fitness, in its mission statement, says it exemplifies “the highest level of scientific integrity and public accountability.” But it wouldn’t tell us why the grant was cancelled or whether anything like it had happened before. The NIH told us to direct questions about the origin of the virus to the director of national intelligence.

The Chinese Communist Party has also blocked the truth. In the earliest days, the doctor in Wuhan who discovered the outbreak was silenced by local officials. He later died of COVID-19. In February, the Chinese did allow a visit by an international team of experts including American scientists.

White House Coronavirus Task Force Holds Daily Briefing 

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks as President Donald Trump listens during a news briefing at the White House on the coronavirus outbreak, March 20, 2020, in Washington, DC.

President Trump at State of the Union on 2/4/20: We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China.

Initially, President Trump praised China. But in the following weeks, testing in the U.S. failed to catch up to the need, vital equipment was short, bodies filled refrigerated trailers, and science was continuously challenged.

President Trump at 4/23/20 briefing: Then I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection?

As the U.S. led the world in illness and death, the White House moved the focus to the Chinese government.

Last Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pomepo attempted to resurrect a debunked theory that the virus was man-made in China. 

Mike Pompeo on ABC’s “This Week”: Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was man-made. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.

He did have reason. Days before, the director of national intelligence said there was “wide scientific consensus” the virus was not man-made. 

Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week”: Your Office of the DNI says the consensus, the scientific consensus was not man-made or genetically modified.

Mike Pompeo on ABC’s “This Week”: That’s right. I agree with that. 

The same day pompeo tried to have it both ways, President Trump repeated the theory of a Chinese lab accident. 

President Trump at Fox News town hall: I think they made a horrible mistake and they didn’t want to admit it.

The administration has offered no evidence of an accident or genetic engineering. Dr. Elodie Ghedin is studying the genome of the virus in her lab at New York University.

Elodie Ghedin: People have been saying that’s an engineered virus. And it’s not. And we know that by looking at the genetic information, looking at the code. And the code tells you a lot. 

Human-engineered viruses have common and obvious genetic components, including the virus’s overall molecular structure called its backbone.

Elodie Ghedin: If a virus had been engineered, it would’ve used the backbones that we know. And there’s none of that in that virus. And let’s say it was a brand-new backbone. Well, it wouldn’t look like what it’s looking like, because we can find every piece of that virus. We can find these pieces in other very similar viruses that circulate in the wild. From the genetic information, it’s clearly not an engineered virus.

Elodie Ghedin and most experts believe the virus, officially called SARS-CoV-2, passed from a wild animal into humans, perhaps in the wild animal market in Wuhan. Many early cases were traced to this market and a market like it was where the SARS virus jumped into a human in 2003. 

Elodie Ghedin: A lot of these coronaviruses are found in bats. But we haven’t found the exact match. We did find a close match in pangolins. It’s an anteater. It’s a wildlife that’s been traded. People, you know, will consume its meat. But they also use in Chinese medicine, its scales.

Scott Pelley: Is there a way to know that this virus, SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the wild into the human population? Or has that not been proven yet?

Peter Daszak: Well, I’m a scientist. And what I do is I look at the evidence around a hypothesis. There is a huge amount of evidence that these viruses repeatedly emerge into people from wild animals in rural areas through things like hunting and eating wildlife. There is zero evidence that this virus came out of a lab in China. 

Scott Pelley: Does the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to your knowledge, have this virus in its inventory?

Peter Daszak: No.

Scott Pelley: Why do you say so?

Peter Daszak: The closest known relative is one that’s different enough that it is not SARS-CoV-2. So, there’s just no evidence that anybody had it in the lab anywhere in the world prior to the outbreak. 

Matt Gaetz on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: I have called on Secretary Azar to immediately halt this grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They have not been honest and at worst, negligent to the point of many, many deaths throughout the world. 

Matt Gaetz wears a gas mask on the floor of the House in early March

Dishonest and negligent allegations have now ended EcoHealth’s carefully reviewed research designed to stop pandemics. Representative Matt Gaetz wore a gas mask on the floor of the House to lampoon the crisis. This was back in the beginning of March, weeks before masks were common. Peter Daszak, whose researchers wear masks to shield them from viruses in the wild, says his team is now facing layoffs. 

Peter Daszak: This politicization of science is really damaging. You know, the conspiracy theories out there have essentially closed down communication between scientists in China and scientists in the U.S. We need that communication in an outbreak to learn from them how they control it so we can control it better. It’s sad to say, but it will probably cost lives. By sort of narrow-mindedly focusing in on ourselves, or on labs, or on certain cultural politics, we miss the real enemy. 

Millions of deaths each year can be traced back to animal diseases, experts say.

Early cases of COVID-19 are believed to be linked to a live-animal market in Wuhan, China.

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, experts are warning that the next pandemic could arrive at any moment, and again, it could come from animals. To prevent history from repeating itself, experts say governments need to start investing heavily in pandemic prevention efforts.

That means deploying teams of biologists, zoologists and veterinarians to begin monitoring animals and the people who interact with them -- an army of scientists tasked with stamping out the next deadly virus before an animal disease balloons into a global pandemic.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1 billion cases and millions of deaths each year can be traced back to diseases originating from animal populations.

In the past three decades, researchers have found more than 30 bacteria or viruses that are capable of infecting humans. Over three quarters of those are believed to have come from animal populations.

And while the current pandemic may feel like a very rare happening, scientists say the pace of these pandemics is accelerating dramatically thanks to humans' ever-encroaching proximity to wildlife.

Beginning with SARS almost two decades ago and followed by West Nile, Ebola, Zika and currently, COVID-19, many of these pandemics originated with species of bats, and can be spread between people through coughing and sneezing or through insects such as mosquitoes.

"The time between these outbreaks is getting shorter and shorter," said [Dr. Tracey S. McNamara (born 1954)], a professor of pathology at Western University of Health Sciences College of Veterinary Medicine.

And it's becoming increasingly clear that these viruses aren't just a threat to our health -- they're also a threat to the global economy.

"We are only able to sustain an outbreak maybe once every decade," said [Dr. Peter Daszak (born 1965)], president of EcoHealth Alliance. "The rate we are going is not sustainable."

The COVID-19 pandemic did not surprise McNamara and Daszak. For decades, they, and other scientists, have been warning politicians and the public that wild and domestic animals -- and the viruses they carry -- pose a threat to humanity.

Without proper monitoring and surveillance of these creatures, they warned, we would be ill-prepared to stop a virus from spreading across the globe. [Dr. Tracey S. McNamara (born 1954)] was part of the "Red Dawn" group, a now-infamous email chain of top scientists that asked powerful U.S. government officials to mount a more vigorous domestic defense back when coronavirus was still considered a problem confined to China's borders.

And Daszak, who has spent much of his career hunting for the next pandemic-causing virus in bat caves in Asia, saw U.S. government funding for his science slashed back in April.

Perhaps most ominously, a U.S.-funded early-warning system called PREDICT, which was launched in 2009 in response to the H5N1 bird flu outbreak, saw its funding quietly lapse in late 2019.  [Dr. Peter Daszak (born 1965)], whose group EcoHealth Alliance received some funding from PREDICT, lamented its loss at the time, arguing it's much cheaper for governments to stamp out small outbreaks than try to control a massive pandemic.

But there are some signs now, with the coronavirus pandemic in full swing, that funding to these crucial programs is coming back. PREDICT was granted an emergency six-month extension, and a new program, called Stop Spillover, is slated to launch in October.

And while it may be too late to stop this coronavirus in its tracks, scientists say the threat of the spillover event grows more imminent each year. As our population continues to expand, the interactions between humans and wildlife grow closer and closer. Cutting down forests and altering habitats push animals out of their own homes and deeper into human communities.

Poorly developed hygiene and sanitation systems can make it more likely for germs to build up. With humans and animals living in such close proximity, bacteria and viruses can easily jump from one species to another.

Once people become infected, the increasing interconnectedness of our world makes the spread of the disease easier. People and domestic animals are able to traverse the globe in a matter of hours. Illegal trade of exotic animals can move across borders undetected, carrying with them deadly bacteria and viruses.

"Several epidemiological drivers have been identified that make bacteria and viruses from animal populations suitable to emerge in a susceptible population. These drivers include climate change, industrial development, ecosystem change and social inequality," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and contributor to ABC News.

So how do bacteria or viruses go from infecting animals to infecting humans?

One of the most common ways is coming into direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected animal, such as a bat. This includes saliva, blood, urine and feces. Indirectly, people can come into contact with these through soil, plants, in animal habitats or by eating or drinking something that is contaminated.

Mosquitoes and ticks are two animals that are known to easily spread bacteria and viruses, including West Nile and Zika virus. After biting an infected person, mosquitoes and ticks are able to spread the virus to every subsequent person they bite.

According to [Dr. Tracey S. McNamara (born 1954)], rabies and plant diseases that can damage crops are the two diseases under surveillance in the United States.

"We don't think about it in the United States as much," said Dr. Christine Johnson, a professor of epidemiology and ecosystem health at the University of California--Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics. "There is a lot of active work to maintain vigilance for diseases. There is currently an outbreak of Ebola going on right now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

In Southeast Asia, efforts at identifying emerging diseases are focused on testing for viruses in both animals and people, especially in places where viruses can spill over, or find a new host, such as in humans, explained Daszak.

"We only know how to look for known diseases," said [Dr. Tracey S. McNamara (born 1954)]. Her vision is for a disease surveillance system to focus syndromes, a group of symptoms that are known to occur together.

By empowering veterinarians to share their findings with each other, McNamara hopes that this can help experts quickly identify the source of an outbreak before it spreads.

"Future efforts in zoonotic disease surveillance should include strong integration of animal and human agencies of health, including wildlife, agriculture and public health," added Brownstein.

John Daszak is a British operatic tenor. He made his debut with the Royal Opera in 1996,[1] and has performed widely in Europe.[2]

Daszak's father was Ukrainian, and his mother British.[3]

Daszak trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Royal Northern College of Music and the Accademia d’Arte Lirica, Osimo, Italy.[1]

Tenor John Daszak to debut at Metropolitan Opera on May 4 

by Helen Smindak 

NEW YORK – British-born tenor John Daszak, the son of a Ukrainian émigré who settled in England after World War II, will make his first appearance on the Metropolitan Opera stage on May 4. 

Mr. Daszak, considered one of the most versatile of Britain’s new generation of tenors, will sing the role of Captain Vere in Benjamin Britten’s retelling of Herman Melville’s shipboard drama “Billy Budd.” Appearing with him will be baritone Nathan Gunn as the innocent hero Billy Budd and bass-baritone James Morris as Budd’s nemesis. 

The three-hour production will be pre- sented again on May 10 and 12. 

Mr. Daszak is the nephew of Zenon Dashak (they spell their last names differently), who was a professor of viola and the long-time rector of the Lviv National Academy of Music and taught the celebrat- ed viola player Yuri Bashmet. 

His Met debut comes during a season that includes the title role of Zemlinsky’s “Der Zwerg” at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera, Jim Mahoney in “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” with the De Vlaamse Opera in Belgium, and Grishka Kuterma in “The Invisible City of Kitezh” with the Netherlands Opera. 

A former member of English National Opera, Mr. Daszak has performed frequently with major U.K. opera companies, including the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne Festival and Welsh National Opera. 

Based in London, Mr. Daszak has made many important international debuts – Vienna’s Staatsoper, Frankfurt and Hamburg Operas, Opera National de Paris, La Scala Milan and Valencia’s Palais de les Arts. 

His performance as Loge in “Das Rheingold” won critical acclaim: one reviewer who pointed to his “lyrical, musical, dramatic presence with a voice the tim- bre of which reminded me of the late, great Gerhard Stolze.” Another critic declared that “John Daszak has a flexible, beautiful voice combined with a most intelligent, effortless characterization.” 

The tenor’s career highlights include Aaron in “Moses und Aron,” Mephistopheles in “Dr. Faustus” and the title role of “Peter Grimes.” He has also sung the role of Zinovy in “Lady Macbeth of Mitsensk” and Prince Golitsin in “Khovanshchina.” 

A popular concert performer with a repertoire ranging from Mahler and Janacek through Rossini, Beethoven and Verdi, Mr. Daszak has collaborated with such world- renowned conductors as Kurt Masur, Leonard Slatkin and Sir Colin Davis. 

His recordings include the role of Loge in “Das Rheingold,” conducted by Zubin Mehta, and Pfitzer’s “Palestrina,” conducted by Simone Young, both on DVD. 

Mr. Daszak was born in Manchester, where he studied at Chetham’s School of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music. 

John Daszak’s performance catches the eye during the current revival of Elektra at Covent Garden even though he is not on stage for very long. However during this season he will face a much bigger challenge when he sings both Siegfrieds in the new Dieter Dorn production of Der Ring des Nibelungen with the Grand Théâtre de Genève to be conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. He is widely considered one of Europe’s most versatile tenors. Recent seasons have seen him make many important role debuts – notably as Captain Vere (Billy Budd) at the Metropolitan Opera, in the title role in Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg in Munich, as the Drum Major (Wozzeck) at the Berlin State Opera and his first Siegfried (Götterdämmerung) in São Paulo – and he is also a popular concert performer. The interview took place in his dressing room towards then end of the rehearsals for Elektra and John talked about his how he was brought up in a home full of music, his time at Chetham’s, his training, his career to date and why it is now time to sing Wagner.

What is your background and how did you get interested in music?

My father was a Ukrainian who had ended up in Britain at the end of the Second World War. Thankfully for him he was taken prisoner by the Allies and later released into the community rather than sent back to Ukraine and be dispatched with. He ended up in Manchester where I was born after he married a British woman, she was half Welsh and half English – so technically I am only a quarter English [laughs]. So I was brought up here but never really felt I always fitted in. It was only when I started travelling around I realised why my father was so culturally very different to those around me. In fact, my interest in music comes from both my parents. My father sang with a famous male voice choir in Manchester called ‘Homin’ and my mother loved classical music whilst my father was more interested in folk music but there was always recordings of opera to listen to at home. Even though I was brought up in a working class family – we were certainly not middle class though we were aspiring to be, not that I knew much about that at the time – I was surrounded by music. My mother would sing with us a bit too and my older brothers also were interested in some form of music. On my mother’s first trip abroad they went to Italy to Arena di Verona and brought back a large cartoon drawing that had been done of her as a diva on the Arena di Verona stage and that hung in our house when I was a child, I still have it somewhere.

At that time in the 1970s they trying children out with all sorts of different educational things and for me it was musical instruments and singing that I took to. I was playing the violin at five and nagging my parents about getting lessons for it. However when my mother approached a number of teachers about something for me she was told it was far too early and they usually start with a child who is seven or eight – so my mother replied ‘Well, what about Mozart?’ I thought that was a great answer even if I could never claim to have been a Mozart [laughs]! I eventually went to study the violin at Chetham’s School of Music that was local and a great move for me, there had been the possibility of sending me to the Menuhin School but that was long way from home and my mother didn’t want that because she thought I would suffer – and so would she. I had actually been accepted at six but that was still too early apparently, so I went to Chetham’s when I turned seven. There you get a fantastic musical grounding, it’s not all just in the theory of music but there are a number of things you can get involved in such as orchestra, or you could set up quartets. It was a fantastic time for me, I really enjoyed it, partly because I wasn’t boarding there as I could live at home and there was none of the trauma about being ripped from my family. One of my greatest influences there was Michael Brewer who has now been found guilty of child molesting incidents and been imprisoned but I knew nothing of this at the time.

How long were you at Chetham’s and what did you do there?

I was at Chetham’s from 7 to 18 – others have done their whole time there, like me, though not many. At Chetham’s they pride themselves on their music education obviously but that is not all they offer. In my time there was something like 350 students and 180 teachers and, of course, it was very expensive but they gave us a good, normal, academic education and that was necessary because a lot of those who left Chetham’s never went into music and are now very successful in other fields – so it is not at all a wasted time. Everything happens in tandem: there is a very good academic education and a very high level – and large amount – of extra-curricular musical activities. The day was often very long, though I didn’t mind it at the time as I enjoyed it so much. We would have our academic lessons with our music ones in between and we would start at 8am and might go on till 8 in the evening doing things after school. Because there were a lot of boarders there would often be orchestral and other music rehearsals in the evening.

I started on the violin and, if I say so myself, was brilliant when I was seven. However, to be a great violinist you have to practice your technique endlessly and I just hated locking myself away when some of my friends where out playing football. Whilst there I also did quite a bit of singing which was good for me as by the time I was 13 or 14 it was clear I wasn’t going to be the world’s greatest violinist. You usually go down in stages with the instrument first trying the viola but I went directly to double bass – mainly because they needed bass players and I was so big that I could easily carry the thing [laughs]! I played that until I was about 16, yet all the time I was also singing in various choirs or shows. It was when my voice had broken and eventually settled – and because of the influence of all the opera I encountered – that I began thinking I was Pavarotti and started to try and sing everything he sang! I was fortunate to see him once in recital in Manchester and that was quite amazing – I remember my mother paying an awful lot of money for me to see him. So I was playing the double bass and studying singing and learning the piano because if that wasn’t your first instrument everyone studied it as their second one. It was a great musical grounding for me and has subsequently meant I can learn music quite quickly and sight-read as well.

How did the move into opera come about?

At 18 I started to audition for music colleges and got into a few but – being 18 – I thought now’s my big chance and I would go down to London and hit the opera scene as a tenor [laughs]. I accepted a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and studied with Rudolf Piernay but we didn’t get on even though he is known as a great teacher. I changed to Johanna Peters in my second year but after a while I thought about giving it all up as I was very disillusioned. As a young student there I had little money and no possibility of getting any. I even tried driving a cab for a few nights but ended up so exhausted it was physically impossible for me to go into college and sing the next day. I thought many times about actually giving up but the college principal said why didn’t I go and sing to Joe Ward back home at the Royal Northern College of Music and it was the greatest thing I could have done. He immediately told me I mustn’t give up and to come there to give it another year – one year turned into five and I worked with Nicholas Powell. Compared to the Guildhall I found there was more space and a better social life, in London everyone lived so far away and you would rarely meet. I think things are much better now but back then you could never get a practice room and it wasn’t really a nice area to mix with your friends – it was the exact opposite in Manchester.

During my time there I auditioned for the Glyndebourne Chorus and I also once auditioned for the Bayreuth Chorus and was so offended when I didn’t get in because they had enough first tenors. I was very disappointed because I remember having the distinct feeling ‘Everybody’s in the Bayreuth Chorus’ but I wasn’t [laughs]! But I did get the chorus job at Glyndebourne which was great because there if they think you are good enough they’ll give you covers and they will actually allow you to go on, unlike a lot of places. I started in Mozart in 1991 and did two summers there whilst studying. I covered Števa in Jenůfa and some other small roles and was in the Peter Grimes chorus – it was all a great experience. Peter Moores, who had helped me out financially during my last two years at the Royal Northern, then gave me a scholarship to go and study in Italy at what was basically a bel cantoacademy – the Accademia d’Arte Lirica in Osimo – that he knew about. At the time I was singing a lot of quite lyrical repertoire, a lot of Mozart and songs but lots of people had their own ideas about what repertoire I should do, especially because I am quite tall. I don’t have a huge voice but I think it carries well and is big when it needs to be – I also have the ability to learn difficult music and sing it. In Italy we indeed worked on bel canto the whole time – and especially lots of Donizetti – but it was good both physically and vocally for me. It benefitted me in other ways because when I came back people said ‘You’ve studied in Italy, you must be great’ and so I began to be offered small parts and covers.

What opportunities did you get to show what you could do and how did things go for you at the start of your career?

I guess my biggest one at the time was to cover Števa in Jenůfa for English National Opera. Since I had already done that at Glyndebourne I had already learnt the role quite well and everyone told me because of the tenor I was covering I was bound to get a chance to get on stage and sing it. I was quite ‘green’ at the time and didn’t think more about it until I did get the chance to sing a couple of shows which was great fun. I remember meeting the director on the set and she was a bit stressed because a cover was going on in her production but I was fine because I knew the piece and had been rehearsing very well. Mark Elder saw me in that and was impressed and he has been one of those people – in fact, there have been quite a number over the years – who told me I should be singing Wagner. Indeed very early on I went to audition for La bohème at ENO after doing a couple of things there and my agent said it was ‘a great audition’ and ‘if they do not give it to you they are crazy’ but all they talked about was me doing Siegfried in a new Ring cycle – and that was 20 years ago [laughs]! So this is the problem singers are up against in a lot of casting situation and they can have fixed opinions. It is easier if you can give them a package they can understand and my problem in a way was that I always had a very varied repertoire because vocally and physically I can do it – also dramatically I love to get involved with my characters and I won’t just be standing there and singing. As a result people do not see me in anything specific which can be a bit of a problem sometimes; but can also be great because I get to do a wide variety of things even though I am a getting a little more specialised now as I get older as I am finding I am fitting into a more specific type of repertoire.

How was it for you at the ENO, did singing in English help or harm you career and what happened next?

I enjoyed my time there and, thankfully, I always got a fantastic response as people could hear what I was saying. Singing in English there was important for me because naturally I am keen on communicating when I am singing and performing; I strive for that regardless of the language the opera is in. To do this properly the work begins when I am learning the role. I also try and learn the history of the role and do as much background work as possible. My worst fear is to arrive unprepared, it’s just the way I am, but I actually seem to arrive better prepared than many of the others because I want to make the most of communicating to an audience – and, if  necessary, move them – by delving into a character both musically and dramatically. As a singer the first thing you must do is make sure you get heard and that people can understand the language. There might be somebody listening who speaks German or Czech or Hungarian, so I am always striving to basically get my words right. I’ll do as much work as I have to and make sure it is as realistic as possible and that is what I’ve tried to do at the two big places I’ve worked at, the ENO and in Munich – these have been my two ‘staple diets’ so far even though I worked at lots of other places, including here at Covent Garden a few times.

When I started in Munich I remember the first thing I did there was Alban Berg’s Lulu. In that there is a significant scene between my character, Alwa, and The Athlete. Naturally it’s in German but there were two English guys speaking it for what seemed like 10 minutes – even though it is just probably a minute and a half! There we were on a stage in Bavaria and it was very scary to start with. We worked hard on it and people seemed to enjoy it – in fact so much so, that they came up to me speaking in German immediately as they assumed I could speak the language because my pronunciation must have been good enough. The Athlete was a fine singer called Jacek Strauch and I saw his name before meeting him and assumed he was probably Polish-German but when he came up to me he said in a refined voice ‘Hello John’ and it turned out he was born in London and spoke better English than I did [laughs]!

From what you have said so far you seem to enjoy being a singer.

Like many people I’m very passionate about music and, of course, it is also in my blood. When I was working at the ENO I often made the mistake of saying to my wife ‘I’ve got to go to school – oh, I mean, I’ve got to go to work’ [laughs]. It is problem as we can sometimes undervalue what we do and allow people to walk all over us because intrinsically it is a vocational job – you have absolutely love it otherwise you will not survive in it. Nowadays it is not as ridiculously well paid as it was in even as recently as 20 years ago – and I have heard stories of what people were being paid then. When on contract in Stockholm early last century Jussi Björling was on film star money but is nothing like that for anyone now!

How are you enjoying singing Ägisth in Elektra?

I didn’t know the piece at all when I was asked to do it though I’d heard how Ägisth is known within the tenor repertoire as being an important role. I opened the score and was fingering through it and trying to find where he was – it wasn’t until the last few pages that I found when he appears. It didn’t seem much but then I looked on YouTube and saw James King doing it and thought ‘Wow’! It’s short, high octane and quite important – even if it’s only three minutes. He is the turning point for Elektra, she’s after vengeance and seeing me brought to justice gives her what she needs – in a way something of a ‘release’ I suppose. It’s not easy to sing, is difficult musically and goes quite high at the end. Ägisth is not like my normal roles when I am on stage the whole time and never get a break – then you have to learn to pace yourself. Here although it is very difficult you can throw yourself into it and in a couple of minutes it is over and you can relax. It is not that easy to cast as you cannot just have anybody doing it. Previously it used to be sung by heldentenors who were later in their careers but now it is often someone of my own age and in their prime who sings it. At the moment we are doing stage rehearsals and there is still blood in the bathroom from where I get killed when trapped in a revolving door by Iain Paterson as Orest [laughs].

I’m enjoying working with Andris Nelsons, his beat takes a little bit of getting used to, but he is clearly so passionate about the music and knows every note of Elektra. I’ve watched him on the monitor from backstage and he’s really enjoying it which is fantastic and quite inspiring. We’ve just had a great stage and orchestra rehearsal this morning and he did a few musical notes afterwards. The great thing is that it is not such a long opera and in those rehearsals you can go through half the opera, then go back and work on it again and still have lots of time. Charles Edwards’ production is updated and I think is set around the time Strauss wrote it. I have no idea how Ägisth is traditionally done but in this I am basically a pervy letch who has had all the women in the household but can’t get Elektra who is winding him round her little finger. He comes in drunk and this can be great for a singer because if you mess up – though I hope not to – you can always say ‘I was trying to be drunk and slur it a bit’ [laughs]. The set is both old and new with something from Ancient Greece, as well as, some modern architecture – it’s very decadent, very bloody … and, I think, very exciting. Its powerful stuff even if it can make you feel a little uneasy because the music has this undercurrent all the way through it and only relaxes and lets go of you when everyone is murdered at the end.

You have sung a number of important Britten roles what makes his music so special do you think?

I’ve sung most of the major Britten roles and he is just perfect for my voice. I never heard Peter Pears live but I have listened to a lot of things he did and his voice was efficient, ringing and carried because it was big. I don’t particular like his sound because although he could sing beautifully it wasn’t a naturally beautiful timbre; however the placing and phrasing is very similar to mine. I would not say that I find the Britten roles easy because they are always emotionally and physically intense – especially the way they must be performed – but they fit my voice like a glove. So long as I do nothing stupid [laughs] I can usually get through them without much trouble at all and, in fact, they are a joy to sing. I think Britten is one of the last great opera composers because he knew exactly what he was doing vocally and wrote for specific people. This was lucky for me as he loved music and loved singing, as well as, knew how to orchestrate.

Finally it seems you have decided the time is right to sing Wagner and tackle Siegfried?

Like I said before the jury’s been out on what sort of repertoire I should do at this stage of my career. I avoided Wagner for many years even though I had been told many times ‘You would be a great Siegfried’ and similar encouraging things about him. Truthfully, I never really enjoyed Wagner and had always thought of myself as a heavy, high, lyric tenor that could do a lot of repertoire and I knew how once you start singing Wagner it is often quite difficult to turn the train back – you can jump off but can never really turn it around [laughs]. Then Zubin Mehta wanted me for Loge in Valencia – and although that character is nothing like Siegfried – it got me into Wagner in a quite low pressure way. I was able to hang out with Wagnerian singers and see what type of animal they are and what they have to sing. I have listened to rehearsals of both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung even though I was not in them.

My Rheingold was an interesting experience, I remember we were rehearsing on stage one day and Loge was supposed to be having an intimate conversation with Wotan and the director separated far apart. We couldn’t understand this but next day there was this huge screen between us and we realised had we been together we would have just been in the way of his high definition projector [laughs]. I had the added advantage of being on a Segway with a ridiculous costume over it and I could manipulate myself into whatever position I needed to sing. It all looks glorious on the DVD and was great fun for me as my first taste of Wagner. As for Siegfried, I was approached by someone who used to direct here at the Royal Opera House, André Heller-Lopes, who was on the Jette Parker Young Artists programme and assisted on a lot of shows including Thomas Adès’ The Tempest I sang in here. We had got quite friendly and he was also one of those people who said I could sing Siegfried. Now he is back in Brazil and doing a lot of productions there, he asked if I was free and interested to sing Götterdämmerung in São Paulo. I thought it would be good to try it out there with someone I trusted and a very experienced Brazilian conductor, Luiz Fernando Malheiro, and we had a great time. I’d been told it was a scary part but I thought what’s so scary about this? Of course, there are a couple of notes that are awkward – but I love to get my teeth into that sort of music. The character is almost written for me, he is youthful, naïve, a bit childish, hates injustice and gets dumped on by everybody in the end – almost the story of my life [laughs]!

I’ve always been brave and willing to take things on and do them so it’s going to be very interesting. My only other Wagner roles so far is Erik – that I recently sang for the first time in Sydney – and that was surprising for me as its really like Mozart. It is quite high and very lyrical and needs a certain resonance and sound but is beautifully written music – a bit like Lieder but heavier. I enjoyed Erik, he is a passionate lover who makes a good foil for the Dutchman. I worked on both Siegfried roles just to check them out and see if I could sing them and then I went to sing something from them to Ingo Metzmacher who will conduct the Ring in Geneva. After we worked on some things, he also asked me if I was scared of this role as it was one tenors are usually afraid of. Scared of what? I believe I have sung much more dramatic roles and much heavier ones. Time will tell but I think if you singing Siegfried in a classical style it is much lighter and much less harmful to the voice than a lot of the things I have sung. I remember Mark Elder – who was trying to persuade me to do some Wagner with him and the Hallé -saying ‘You know Alberto Remedios sang it so lyrically and beautifully’. It’ll be an interesting time because obviously once a singer starts singing Siegfried there is a focus on you and I’m sure people are waiting around to see how it all goes for me.

Jim Pritchard

Lesson 68 [...] :   Z. DASHAK

In October 1951 Zenon Olexiyovych Dashak (1928 - 1993),  who ,vas teaching the viola class , entered the post-graduate course at Kyiv Conservatoire . The musician was born in the town of Striy of Drogobych region , Lviv oblast' . He studied at Lviv Conservatoire (1946-1951), which he graduated from as an "orchestra soloist , teacher of viola class '·. From 1949 till 1951 he taught in 'Lviv (viola player of the symphonic orchestra ofLviv Philharmonic Society, the teacher of viola and quartet in L viv S. A. Krushelnitska 's secondary special musical school) . Since 1951 he ,vas the post-graduate student at Kyiv Conservatoire at V. Goldfeld's class.  In 1955 Z. Dashak defended a thesis on the topic: "Chamber Instrumental Compositions and M. Lysenko 's Performance Activity".  Since 1961 he had been an associate professor, since 1962 ,vas the head of the Chair of Bow Instruments , since 1963 - pro-rector on the scientific and academic works of Kyiv Conservatoire . In 1961 Zenon Olexiyovych was awarded the order ''Znak Poshany ' (''The Sign of Respect') . Till that time he had written and published over 30 scientific and scientific -methodical works , had concerts of I. Khandoshkin and G. Handel, made many editions and workings for viola. Except for intensive scientific pedagogical and administrative -social activity , the talented musician continued pe1forming . So, for example , he performed in the teachers' quartet of Kyiv State Conservatoire (P. Makarenko , V. Stetsenko , Z. Dashak , V. Chervov) . In 1965 Zenon Olexiyovych moved to Lviv because of his appointment as a rector of Lviv Conservatoire . 

Among the students of the Honoured Art Worker of Ukraine Candidate of Arts Professor Z. Dashak , there are : Yu. Kholodov (laureate of the International competition of quartets in Budapest , 1963 the II prize , Honourary Artist of Ukraine , associate-professor);  A. Venzhega (winner of the All-Union competition of viola players , 1963 laureate of the Republican competition of the young performers , 1969, Honourary Artist of Ukraine , an associate professor);  B. Shchutskyi (Honourary Artist of Ukraine an associate professor concertmaster of iola players ' orchestra of the National Opera and Ballet House of Ukraine);  Yu. Zolotarenko (the performer of the National Opera and Ballet House's orchestra of Ukraine);  D. Gavry lets (associate professor of P. I. Tchaikovskyi NMAU, Honoured Art Worker of Ukraine) and others.