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Pandemics: spend on surveillance, not prediction

Trust is undermined when scientists make overblown promises about disease prevention, warn Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut and Kristian G. Andersen.
  1. Edward C. Holmes

    1. Edward C. Holmes is professor of biology at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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  2. Andrew Rambaut

    1. Andrew Rambaut is professor of molecular evolution at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

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  3. Kristian G. Andersen

    1. Kristian G. Andersen is assistant professor of immunology and microbiology at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, USA.

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The resurgence of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this May is a stark reminder that no amount of DNA sequencing can tell us when or where the next virus outbreak will appear. More genome sequence data were obtained for the 2013–16 Ebola epidemic than for any other single disease outbreak. Still, health workers in Mbandaka, the country’s northwestern provincial capital, are scrambling to contain a growing number of cases.

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Nature 558, 180-182 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05373-w

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