But with so many question marks hovering over the identity of Ebola’s reservoirs, some scientists say that it is time to eschew virus hunting in specific creatures and instead pursue more-holistic approaches that examine ecological and anthropological factors common to spillovers.
Tony Goldberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is one such advocate. He no longer subscribes to the view that “we have to blanket the continent of Africa with field-deployable DNA sequencers and sample everything that crawls, flies or swims and eventually we’ll come across it. I used to think that way,” he says, “but I’m cooling off to that approach.”
His team is studying how bush-meat hunters interact with wild ecosystems to identify factors that might be linked to the spillover of zoonotic infections such as Ebola.
In a similar effort, a team led by Pigott and his colleague epidemiologist Simon Hay is looking at past outbreaks for common ecological factors, such as vegetation, elevation and the presence of suspected reservoir species such as fruit bats and carriers such as apes. By modelling these data, the team has created a map of areas at risk of Ebola spillovers.
And Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, is using machine-learning techniques to predict which bat species are likely to harbour Ebola and related viruses because they share ecological factors common to suspected reservoir species.
Research on Ebola therapies and vaccines saw an infusion of public and private funding during the epidemic, and scientists hunting the virus in the wild hope to capture the same sense of urgency and financial support. But they know that the job won’t be easy. “It has lit a fire under people’s butts, mine included,” says Goldberg. “The problem is, we’re not sure what to do with the fire.”
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Tony Goldberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is one such advocate. He no longer subscribes to the view that “we have to blanket the continent of Africa with field-deployable DNA sequencers and sample everything that crawls, flies or swims and eventually we’ll come across it. I used to think that way,” he says, “but I’m cooling off to that approach.”
His team is studying how bush-meat hunters interact with wild ecosystems to identify factors that might be linked to the spillover of zoonotic infections such as Ebola.
In a similar effort, a team led by Pigott and his colleague epidemiologist Simon Hay is looking at past outbreaks for common ecological factors, such as vegetation, elevation and the presence of suspected reservoir species such as fruit bats and carriers such as apes. By modelling these data, the team has created a map of areas at risk of Ebola spillovers.
And Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, is using machine-learning techniques to predict which bat species are likely to harbour Ebola and related viruses because they share ecological factors common to suspected reservoir species.
Research on Ebola therapies and vaccines saw an infusion of public and private funding during the epidemic, and scientists hunting the virus in the wild hope to capture the same sense of urgency and financial support. But they know that the job won’t be easy. “It has lit a fire under people’s butts, mine included,” says Goldberg. “The problem is, we’re not sure what to do with the fire.”
- More Here
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