Wildlife Conservation Society to expand health surveillance through PREDICT

USAID develops initiative to monitor diseases that move between animals and people

The Wildlife Conservation Society will play a key role in a new international effort to monitor diseases that move between animals and people in order to prevent the next global pandemic.

The global early warning system—named PREDICT and created with incremental funding of up to $75 million over 5 years from the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats Program —will help develop global capacity to anticipate and prevent emerging infectious diseases through monitoring and identifying possible pathogenic threats at the human-animal interface. The Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program builds on the successes of USAID's long-standing programs in disease surveillance, training, and outbreak response, particularly those addressing avian and pandemic influenza.

PREDICT will benefit from the expertise of WCS's Global Health Program, which monitors wildlife diseases in more than 40 countries worldwide. WCS is a leader in wildlife health issues and currently leads the Global Avian Influenza Network for Surveillance (GAINS), which tracks the movements of avian influenza through wild bird populations in the field and on the GAINS database. WCS also created the One World-One Health ™ model for promoting international and interdisciplinary strategies that encourage health experts from around the world to share information on the movements of diseases between humans and animals.

WCS is one of five members on the PREDICT team, which also includes UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine (the consortium's leader), Wildlife Trust, Global Viral Forecasting, Inc., and the Smithsonian Institution.

Additional collaborators include the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, Princeton University, and HealthMap.org (a global disease alert mapping system).

PREDICT is one of five initiatives being funded by USAID to help prepare the world for infectious diseases like H1N1 flu, avian flu, SARS and Ebola. The other four USAID initiatives in the Emerging Pandemic Threats Program are PREPARE, IDENTIFY, RESPOND, and PREVENT.

"The Wildlife Conservation Society is proud to be part of this new effort to identify emerging disease threats before they become global pandemics," said Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Wildlife health is one of our main priorities, and our existing capacity to monitor wildlife populations will augment PREDICT's ability to spot potential pandemics before they occur and help formulate effective measures to prevent health crises."

"Our globalized society presents the health community with new challenges that necessitate a coordinated effort for detecting diseases that move across the human-animal nexus," said Dr. William Karesh, Vice President and Director of WCS's Global Health Program and Senior Technical Advisor of PREDICT. "This new consortium will help inform key decisions by health agencies and governments on critical health issues."