Should We Prepare for Future Pandemics?

Editorial

In the history of our planet, civilizations have emerged and disappeared for different reasons. Surely one of them has been the epidemics that devastated entire villages. The first pandemic recorded in history occurred between the years 165 to 180 of the time of the Roman Empire and thus different pandemics appeared over the years [1].

Undoubtedly, the first pandemics appeared due to poor sanitary conditions and wars. But in our times, where we have achieved better living conditions, modernity brings with it climate change and population dynamics as two elements that converge to cause diseases of rapid social transmission. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that a deadly virus can travel the world in a matter of days.

Human animal interaction and anthropogenic activities such as deforestation, mining, untreated waste, fossil fuel burning and international travel; are involved in the activation of pathogenic reservoirs, the emergence and severity of pandemics, because they produce changes in microbial ecology, responsible for the mutation and recombination of pathogenic microorganisms [2].

The population dynamics will not stop, on the contrary, after a long period of restrictions, today there is greater consumption of resources with a growing flow of interrelations and travel. If expected then, new pandemics will emerge more frequently in the future, making them global challenges.

If so, the pandemic must have served to make the new settler of the world a provisional being, prepared and aware of future risks; to whom a pandemic should not take it by surprise again.

While true, the Covid-19 pandemic drove accelerated achievements in vaccine development, opening a new era in vaccine technologies [3]; we cannot trust that the next pandemic will be stopped thanks to these advances.

It is necessary to plan strategies from the local to the global level, with a multisectoral and transdisciplinary approach, where scientists, specialists, managers, academic institutions, politicians and social actors start by recognizing the interconnection between human health, animals and the environment; adopting holistic work with practices of international collaboration, open science and data exchange [4].

There is also the challenge of having specialists with high experience and knowledge in the application of mathematical models of data of different nature, including economic, political and health [5]; that contribute to the analysis of the past, present and future of pandemics.

Such a complex preparation demands the use of appropriate terminology that gives it the meaning of its implication. The term pandemiology is a proposal of supra epidemiological specialty for the prevention, mitigation and solution of pandemic events with a comprehensive approach [6].

Consequently, the lived experience should leave us with lessons to take into account for the following events. From now on, planning in all areas must be a priority of each nation. The development of preventive and contingency plans, based on a transdisciplinary approach, should be a common factor; regardless of the socio-economic classification of the country.