Taking Stock: Pandemic potential
Pandemic prevention | Eradicating goat plague | Beta bird flu vaccine | Childhood vaccinations | Soil microbes | Bird flu 101
Pandemic prevention—Sam Matey
‘In a world-historic step forward, May 2025 saw 124 member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) vote to adopt the WHO Pandemic Agreement, a new legally binding treaty to improve international coordination on planning for and responding to any future pandemics. (The U.S. is in the process of leaving the WHO, since January 2025, and did not join the new treaty). Among other provisions, the treaty includes plans for wealthier countries to share more tests, vaccines, and treatments with poorer countries as well as structures to create world-spanning supply chain, logistics, early-warning, and pandemic prevention financing networks. It will go into effect when 60 states ratify it. As climate change roils ecosystems and increases the risk of zoonotic disease “spillover” events, this efflorescence of farsighted international cooperation is more welcome than ever! Spectacular news.
‘China has announced a pledge to give $500 million to help fund the WHO over the next 5 years, meaning it will replace the departing U.S. as the global health effort’s top donor. A geopolitical power move — that will likely save a lot of innocent lives.’
sammatey.substack.com
Small stock are multipurpose, endlessly renewable assets for people and national economies across vast regions of Africa, where PPR has a disproportionate impact on poorer households, which typically cannot afford cattle (photo by ILRI/Stevie Mann).
‘Lifting all boats’ with a heat-tolerant and cost-effective vaccine against goat plague—CGIAR
Tackling devastating livestock losses in West Africa
‘Peste des petits ruminants (PPR), commonly known as goat plague, is among the most contagious and fatal of livestock diseases affecting goats and sheep, especially among poor households of developing countries, where it crushes rural livelihoods and sends millions into destitution every year. Goat plague has been spreading into new countries over the past two decades. It causes more than USD 2 billion in global losses annually, with one-third occurring in Africa. The disease has a particular stranglehold on Mali, where one-third of West Africa’s small ruminants are raised.
A vast country larger than California and Texas combined, Mali is arguably ground zero in the current battle to eradicate PPR from the face of the Earth.
‘. . . [T]he PPR vaccine currently available, called “Ovipeste,” is thermolabile, meaning it requires constant cold storage—called a cold chain—that is difficult to maintain in Mali’s brutally hot climate and remote pastoral frontiers. . . .
‘A new hope has emerged in the form of “OvipestePlus,” a heat-tolerant vaccine developed jointly by CGIAR’s International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Mali’s Central Veterinary Laboratory (LCV), and India’s Hester Biosciences Limited. This new “thermotolerant” vaccine retains potency up to 9 days at 32.5°C to 38.5°C and 7 days at 40°C; and for 5 hours after reconstitution with water, making it far better suited to Mali’s challenging conditions than the thermolabile PPR vaccine, which is deactivated by heat and only lasts for 1 hour after its reconstitution. . . .
With Mali’s (hot and rising) temperatures and generally poor infrastructure, the validated thermotolerant PPR vaccine OvipestePlus shows technical superiority over the current thermolabile PPR vaccine Ovipeste.
Why a vaccine? Vaccines remain the gold standard—the most durable and cost-effective instrument—for ensuring animal health. Just one vaccine injection provides small ruminants with lifetime immunity to PPR.
Who benefits: Scaling up deployment of the thermotolerant vaccine in Mali will serve as a “force multiplier”, amplifying a wealth of tangible benefits stemming from healthy and productive stock, particularly for poor women.
Why now? Scaling the vaccine now is particularly timely. Earlier this year, the Pan African Programme for the Eradication of PPR and Control of other Small Ruminant Diseases was launched. At the same time, the European Union has increased its support to the African Union Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR) and PANVAC to eradicate the disease from Africa by 2030. The World Bank has already made a further large commitment to support PPR vaccination in Sahelian countries.
This cooperative enterprise is thus a once-in-a-generation chance to eradicate PPR from the continent. Mali’s successful deployment of the thermostable OvipestePlus vaccine is central to this effort. . . .
An analysis conducted in 2016 of the proposed global PPR eradication program determined a cost-benefit ratio of 33.8 and an internal rate of return of 199%.
‘The total funding required for the five-year scale-up is estimated at USD 108 million (2025–2030), with 56% of that going to vaccine production. This price includes bundling the delivery of OvipestePlus with the Pasteurellosis vaccine, which reduces costs.
‘In Mali, as elsewhere in West Africa, the daily household chores of raising small ruminants—from taking the animals out to graze, to gathering, preparing, and distributing feed, to watering and milking, to caring for sick animals—are carried out largely by women and children. . . . Moving forward, the monitoring system needs to capture the gender and major age group (youth vs adult) of the owners of the animals being vaccinated. . . .
Livestock farmer organizations and cooperatives, as well as the voices of Mali’s many women livestock keepers, will need to be supported and strengthened to push for small ruminant vaccination campaigns and convince policymakers to give the small ruminant sector a higher national priority. And while currently Mali’s livestock owners pay for all their animal vaccinations, it is clear that fully subsidizing PPR vaccination would greatly speed the eradication effort, especially among the poor.
‘Earlier this year (March 2025), ILRI, one of the three institutional developers of the thermotolerant PPR vaccine, established a thermotolerant PPR Vaccine Task Force to galvanize support for OvipestePlus by cultivating and convening allies and navigating the relevant political, development, and immunization landscapes . . . .
‘Given Mali’s strategic importance in West Africa as a major producer and exporter of small ruminants, global eradication of PPR will be possible only if Mali succeeds in its eradication effort. And given LCV’s strategic location within the region and its pioneering experience in utilizing the thermotolerant PPR vaccine, with some upgrading, the Laboratory can and should enlarge its role as a major vaccine supplier to neighboring countries. . . .
‘Today’s PPR eradication campaign is inspired by the successful global effort to eradicate a related Morbillivirus that caused rinderpest. That plague of cattle and wild ungulates regularly wiped out whole herds and devastated communities over several thousand years, infamously killing, in the 1890s, an estimated 80–90% of all cattle in eastern and southern Africa, and consequently starving to death one-third of the population of Ethiopia and two-thirds of the Maasai people of Tanzania. Only the second disease (after human smallpox) to be eradicated globally, rinderpest achieved its official eradication status in 2011. One of the underlying success factors for its global eradication was the development of a thermotolerant vaccine. . . .’
This work to develop a PPR thermotolerant vaccine scaling strategy was conducted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Mali’s Central Veterinary Laboratory, Mali’s General Directorate of Veterinary Services, the World Organization for Animal Health in Mali, the Regional Animal Health Centre in Mali; and JWLOW Ltd., in Kenya. This scaling strategy joint development project was funded by the Gates Foundation and led by the CGIAR Portfolio Performance Unit.
cgiar.org | @CGIAR
+ Video short (50 second) slideshow: A new strategy to eradicate PPR from Mali and its neighbours
+ Video short (34 second) slideshow: Goats and sheep in Mali
Bird-flu vaccine for cattle aces early test—Nature via Good News by Bryan Walsh
Vaccines for livestock could reduce the risk of human outbreaks, but hurdles remain.
‘An experimental mRNA vaccine has protected cattle against the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu virus. Calves immunized with the customized shot showed no detectable virus after being deliberately exposed to the virus, while unvaccinated controls shed large amounts. The adaptable platform could quickly guard herds — and people — against future influenza spillovers, according to early peer-review-pending results.’
nature.com | @nature | vox.com/good-news-newsletter
The good chart—Our World in Data via Good News by Bryan Walsh
‘One chart captures half a century of medical heroism. New modeling from Our World in Data shows that childhood vaccinations have saved more than 150 million young lives since 1974—and an astonishing 94 million of those rescues came from a single shot: the measles vaccine. Every pink bar in the graphic represents a child who grew up, went to school, fell in love, voted, worked, dreamed because a simple, decades-old technology kept a lethal virus at bay.
‘That’s the good news. The bad news is that measles is staging a comeback. Pandemic disruptions, shrinking health budgets, and organized misinformation have pushed global measles coverage down to 83 percent, well below the 95 percent needed for herd immunity. Outbreaks have already surged in the UK, the US, and parts of Africa. The lesson of the chart is clear: When we protect vaccines, vaccines protect us.’
ourworldindata.org | @ourworldindata | vox.com/good-news-newsletter
Reservoirs of resistance—Kevin Blake
By studying the millennia-old arms race between soil-dwelling microbes, scientists can pre-empt antibiotic resistance before it emerges in people.
‘On a summer day in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge’s teenage sons, Calvin Jr. and John, played lawn tennis at the White House. Calvin Jr. didn’t wear socks with his shoes and got a blister. Before long, he showed signs of infection and spiked a fever. He was rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, one of the best hospitals of the day, but despite the doctors’ efforts, sixteen-year-old Calvin Jr. was dead within a week.
‘The microorganism that so quickly took the life of this hapless teenager was Staphylococcus aureus. Found on most people’s skin, this bacterium is relatively harmless—unless it enters the bloodstream, where it can cause fatal infection. For most of human history, bacterial infections were the leading cause of death. Today, that’s no longer the case, thanks to the discovery of antibiotics.
‘After sulfa antibiotics became widely available in the U.S. in the mid-1930s, for example, they led to a 36 percent decline in death rates from maternal conditions, a 24 percent decline in influenza and pneumonia death rates, and an estimated 3 percent decline in death rates overall, according to Our World in Data.
‘However, the paradox of antibiotics is that their very use selects for the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance: bacteria evolve mechanisms to survive the drugs that once killed them.
In the United States, more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur each year, with more than 35,000 patients dying as a result. Experts have speculated that we are careening toward a ‘post-antibiotic’ era, where ‘routine surgery or chemotherapy is considered too dangerous because there are no drugs to prevent or treat bacterial infections.’
‘Historically, scientists and clinicians have studied the genes that cause antibiotic resistance only after they’re found in disease-causing pathogens. But in recent decades, microbiologists have discovered that environmental bacteria—particularly soil-dwelling microbes—encode for resistance genes that are vastly more diverse than those found in human pathogens. They have also found that many of the same resistance genes employed by multidrug-resistant pathogens originally evolved in soil-dwelling bacteria millennia ago, and only jumped into pathogens recently. Studying the well-stocked reservoirs of resistance in soils could therefore help us identify and develop countermeasures against emerging resistance threats before they spread in people. . . .
‘Antibiotic resistance research over the last 20 years has shown that the soil resistome is diverse, ancient, and transferable into human pathogens. And while it may be disheartening to realize that the very ground beneath our feet houses a massive and largely mysterious reservoir of antibiotic resistance, this work has also provided actionable insights for managing resistance threats.
‘First, recognizing that bacteria have been making antibiotics for hundreds of millions of years means it’s unlikely we’ve discovered all the potentially useful compounds that have evolved over such a long time. Ample opportunity remains to discover clinically potent compounds. . . .
‘Second, monitoring resistance genes in soils and other environmental reservoirs could help us prepare for future threats. DNA-based methods could provide us with an early warning system that detects the presence and abundance of resistance genes, informing where and when specific antibiotics should be used. Additionally, scientists could use functional metagenomics to screen new antibiotics against environmental resistomes, helping them identify undiscovered resistance mechanisms that might threaten the future effectiveness of these drugs. . . .
‘The field of microbiology has historically viewed antibiotic resistance through a clinical lens, mobilizing to respond only after resistance has spread into human pathogens. While Calvin Jr.'s fatal Staphylococcus aureus infection could have been cured with penicillin, the treatment window was short: the first penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus was discovered just 2 years after penicillin’s introduction. Today, there are strains of S. aureus resistant to all beta-lactam antibiotics.
‘Taking the long view has enabled a much-needed shift in focus. We cannot stop the evolution of antibiotic resistance—indeed, the key insight from these studies is that resistance to any new antibiotic has likely already existed for millions of years. But by understanding resistance’s ancient origins and modern spread outside the clinic, we can intervene in this process and mitigate its worst impacts. This proactive approach may be what’s needed to finally break the cycle of resistance and avoid returning to a time when even a blister could kill.’
press.asimov.com | @AsimovPress | @kevinsblake
Understanding the basics of bird flu—Sara Frueh
‘. . . About a year ago, there was a transmission from birds into cows—the first time that has happened . . . . The virus then started spreading in dairy herds across the U.S. . . . About a year ago, the first mammal-to-human transmission of H5N1 occurred, spreading from a dairy cow to a person in Texas. . . . For a virus to become an epidemic or pandemic, it needs to be good at human-to-human transmission, and currently bird flu is not . . .
‘“The one way we can prevent the virus from evolving further to adapt to humans is to reduce its chances to cause sporadic infections in humans,” said [Nahid] Bhadelia. “Which is why protecting the workers—particularly those from vulnerable populations, who have language barriers, farmworkers who are migrants who may not have access to health care—ensuring they are tested and get access to care [is important] . . . . Because the more humans this virus affects, it’s like Russian roulette—it could give it chances to adapt.”
—National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (h/t Lynn Brown)
Arresting image
Cow parade in Amsterdam (from Helga Recke)
