Human & Animal Health

The “pre-emergence” phase of pandemics is the focus of a new center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and led by the University of California, Davis. The NSF Center for Pandemic Insights (NSF CPI) aims to harness new technologies and develop sensing to detect, investigate, and ultimately prevent pandemics at their source.

A study published today in the International Journal of Primatology and led by the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis, confirms living Skywalker gibbons in Myanmar. It was the endangered primate’s love songs that alerted scientists that their home extends beyond China and that Myanmar has the largest population of endangered Skywalker gibbons on Earth.

In December of 2022, Professor Christine K. Johnson was selected to serve as a U.S. Science Envoy by the U.S. Department of State. Established in 2011, the Science Envoy Program selects prominent U.S. scientists to travel around the world and build new connections with peer scientists in other countries, encourage policies to support science that benefits society, and forge new international collaborations.

While SARS-CoV-2 has been the focus of everyone’s attention since December of 2019 and continues to impact people’s health around the world, coronaviruses are not a new concern to those studying and responding to emerging diseases and outbreaks. Prior to the pandemic, outbreaks caused by coronaviruses, such as MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-1, presented threats to public health and safety.

Last week, Dr. Christine K. Johnson, Professor and Director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics, spoke as an expert panelist at the "Shared Decision-Making: A Catalyst for Real-World Research Solutions" event.

In November of 2022, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) arrived in Peru, triggering massive pelican and sea lion die-offs. This publication reports genomic characterization of HPAI/H5N1 viruses in two species of marine mammals (dolphins and sea lions) and three species of seabirds (sanderlings, pelicans, and cormorants). These viruses are rapidly accruing mutations that warrant further examination and highlight an urgent need for active local surveillance to manage outbreaks and limit spillover into other species, including humans.

A virus previously found only in bats was detected in the antibodies of people screened for exposure to sarbecoviruses between 2017 and 2020 in rural Myanmar in Southeast Asia, according to a study from the University of California, Davis and collaborators in Myanmar and Singapore. The work is published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

New publication led by OHI's Dr. Tierra Smiley Evans highlights the importance of conducting surveillance of peri-urban primates in regions of high arbovirus transmission.

Myanmar is among the least studied but most heavily forested region in Asia, and CHIKV, ZIKV, DENV and JEV are highly endemic in humans. Scientists investigated whether Myanmar peri-urban primates, living near the largest urban city of Yangon, are exposed to arboviruses of public health concern and could be sources of spillover or recipients of spillback of human pathogenic arboviral diseases.

The October 30th episode of 60 Minutes featured the EpiCenter for Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence work near the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

Watching the mist roll over the tea fields and cross into the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, it seems impossible to imagine that the looming vines and canopy standing in front of us is not an impermeable wall dividing humans from the animals and microbes of the forest. A team of One Health scientists studying zoonotic disease knows otherwise.

In the past decade, scientists have described hundreds of novel viruses with the potential to pass between wildlife and humans. But how can they know which are riskiest for spillover and therefore which to prioritize for further surveillance in people?

Scientists from the University of California, Davis created network-based models to prioritize novel and known viruses for their risk of zoonotic transmission, which is when infectious diseases pass between animals and humans.