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Concept
Pandemic prevention
Summary
Pandemic prevention is the organization and management of preventive measures against pandemics. Those include measures to reduce causes of new infectious diseases and measures to prevent outbreaks and epidemics from becoming pandemics.
It is not to be mistaken for pandemic preparedness or mitigation (e.g. against COVID-19) which largely seek to mitigate the magnitude of negative effects of pandemics, although the topics may overlap with pandemic prevention in some respects.
Some biosafety and public health researchers contend that certain pandemic prevention efforts themselves carry risk of triggering pandemics (e.g. wildlife virus sampling), though not engaging in any form of sampling also carries the risk of being unprepared for future spillover events and being unaware of future pandemic pathogens.
List of pandemics and Smallpox#Eradication
During the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, the SARS-CoV-1 virus was prevented from causing a pandemic of Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Rapid action by national and international health authorities such as the World Health Organization helped to slow transmission and eventually broke the chain of transmission, which ended the localized epidemics before they could become a pandemic. Human-to-human transmission of SARS may be considered eradicated, however, it could re-emerge as SARS-CoV-1 probably persists as a potential zoonotic threat in its original animal reservoir. This warrants monitoring and reporting of suspicious cases of atypical pneumonia. Effective isolation of patients was enough to control spread because infected individuals usually do not transmit the virus until several days after symptoms begin and are most infectious only after developing severe symptoms.
In January 2022, Chinese scientists at the Wuhan University and other institutions reported in a preprint the detection of the closest MERS-CoV relative in bats to date, NeoCoV, and another virus, PDF-2180-CoV, that can efficiently use bats' ACE2 for cell entry.
Official source
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