Abstract
The study of virus disease emergence, whether it can be predicted and how it might be prevented, has become a major research topic in biomedicine. Here we show that efforts to predict disease emergence commonly conflate fundamentally different evolutionary and epidemiological time scales, and are likely to fail because of the enormous number of unsampled viruses that could conceivably emerge in humans. Although we know much about the patterns and processes of virus evolution on evolutionary time scales as depicted in family-scale phylogenetic trees, these data have little predictive power to reveal the short-term microevolutionary processes that underpin cross-species transmission and emergence. Truly understanding disease emergence therefore requires a new mechanistic and integrated view of the factors that allow or prevent viruses spreading in novel hosts. We present such a view, suggesting that both ecological and genetic aspects of virus emergence can be placed within a simple population genetic framework, which in turn highlights the importance of host population size and density in determining whether emergence will be successful. Despite this framework, we conclude that a more practical solution to preventing and containing the successful emergence of new diseases entails ongoing virological surveillance at the human–animal interface and regions of ecological disturbance.
Highlights
Emerging infectious diseases have the potential to wreak havoc on agricultural industries and native flora and fauna, and can pose a significant challenge to the health and economic status of both developed and developing countries
Predicting virus emergence has risen to become a key goal of the study of infectious disease
Due to the fundamental differences between evolutionary and epidemiological time scales, a focus on virus evolution may be a distraction when it comes to predicting the virus pandemic
Summary
Emerging infectious diseases have the potential to wreak havoc on agricultural industries and native flora and fauna, and can pose a significant challenge to the health and economic status of both developed and developing countries. The broad-scale drivers of the apparent increase in the number of emerging diseases are well documented, involving such factors as climate change, environmental disruption, an increasingly centralized agricultural system and rapid global transportation, as well as high densities of humans, animals and crops Combined, these factors have created new opportunities for viruses and other pathogens to change their host range and cause epidemic disease. This work has the implicit and commendable goal of trying to reveal the overarching rules of disease emergence, which in turn might lead to predictions of what virus might emerge and where this may occur [5,6,7,8] Gaining this sort of predictive capability would have obvious and wide-ranging benefits. We will argue that a more practical approach to the challenge of virus emergence will involve abandoning prediction in favour of genomic surveillance at the ecological ‘fault-lines’ of emergence
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