Emerging infectious disease: An underappreciated area of strategic concern for food security

Abstract

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) increasingly threaten global food security and public health. Despite technological breakthroughs, we are losing the battle with (re)emerging diseases as treatment costs and production losses rise. A horizon scan of diseases of crops, livestock, seafood and food‐borne illness suggests these costs are unsustainable. The paradigm of coevolution between pathogens and particular hosts teaches that emerging diseases occur only when pathogens evolve specific capacities that allow them to move to new hosts. EIDs ought to be rare and unpredictable, so crisis response is the best we can do. Alternatively, the Stockholm Paradigm suggests that the world is full of susceptible but unexposed hosts that pathogens could infect, given the opportunity. Global climate change, globalized trade and travel, urbanization and land‐use changes (often associated with biodiversity loss) increase those opportunities, making EID frequent. We can, however, anticipate their arrival in new locations and their behaviour once they have arrived. We can ‘find them before they find us’, mitigating their impacts. The DAMA (Document, Assess, Monitor, Act) protocol alters the current reactive stance and embodies proactive solutions to anticipate and mitigate the impacts of EID, extending human and material resources and buying time for development of new vaccinations, medications and control measures.

Screening potential insect vectors in a museum biorepository reveals undiscovered diversity of plant pathogens in natural areas

“…The onslaught of emerging infectious diseases in crops often involved alternative sources of inoculum and creation of new ecological interfaces, and global changes (e.g., land use or climate warming) set the stage for new associations to occur. Spillover events from natural habitats in direct contact with cultivated fields have been documented for several plant pathogens (Brooks et al, 2021;McCann, 2020), and the involvement of vectors may facilitate host shifts, accelerating the spread of diseases at the regional level. The phytoplasmas associated with Flavescence dorée disease, and related strains (FDp), represent one of the most well-studied pathosystems (Malembic-Maher et al, 2020), providing a good example of spillover from wild plants to a crop (Vitis vinifera) through efficient insect vectors (Brooks et al, 2021;.…”

“…Spillover events from natural habitats in direct contact with cultivated fields have been documented for several plant pathogens (Brooks et al, 2021;McCann, 2020), and the involvement of vectors may facilitate host shifts, accelerating the spread of diseases at the regional level. The phytoplasmas associated with Flavescence dorée disease, and related strains (FDp), represent one of the most well-studied pathosystems (Malembic-Maher et al, 2020), providing a good example of spillover from wild plants to a crop (Vitis vinifera) through efficient insect vectors (Brooks et al, 2021;. For other phytoplasma pathosystems, epidemiological information and characterization of strains associated with crops have accumulated for over forty years.…”

“…Because insects are often difficult to identify and individuals infected with phytoplasmas cannot be distinguished from noninfected individuals except through microscopy, molecular screening, or pathogen transmission trials, efforts to identify competent phytoplasma vectors have lagged far behind efforts to characterize phytoplasmas and their host plants. Due to the mobility of insect vectors, spillovers of vector-borne phytoplasmas from adjacent highly diverse natural habitats into agroecosystems were hypothesized to play an important role in emergence of new phytoplasma diseases (see Brooks et al, 2021). However, few attempts have been made to study phytoplasma diversity in natural habitats.…”

Leveraging natural history biorepositories as a global, decentralized, pathogen surveillance network

“…Reactive attempts to sample and screen wildlife after pathogen emergence in humans delays threat mitigation [ 47 ]. Waiting until a pathogen triggers an epidemic, or worse, a global pandemic is expensive [ 9 , 48 ], does little for future pandemic prevention or preparedness [ 10 , 49 ], and will be diminishingly feasible as human populations become increasingly globally connected [ 50 ]. For example, in reaction to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, there are a suite of new research funding opportunities and major strides have been made in viral discovery and spillover prediction; yet, of the nearly 75,000 animals recently surveyed by Grange and colleagues [ 51 ] as part of the PREDICT Project [ 52 ], not one specimen was permanently archived in a public biorepository, and when there was ambiguity surrounding host identity, only a generic-level name was used.…”

“…EID research and response are inherently multidisciplinary endeavors; thus, we encourage all stakeholders (public health officials, curators, veterinarians, doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, parasitologists, basic and clinical research scientists, wildlife managers, field station managers, natural resource managers, funding agencies, and policy makers, among others) to contribute to the collective growth and availability of wildlife samples and associated informatics through open-access biorepositories ( Fig 3 ) [ 97 ]. Local buy-in for field-based activities and collections and incorporation of perspectives based on traditional ecological knowledge [ 10 , 98 ] are also essential in the feedback process that links basic biodiversity research about hosts and pathogens to actionable processes for people at local and regional levels. To this end, we have identified a series of priority actions for the diverse stakeholders in this network.…”