A stitch in time — and you know the rest

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2024 (499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

That’s an old saying about an old clock.

Truth is, if your digital clock is broken, it’s almost certainly just dark, and as a result, never right.

But the sentiments in the saying are clear: predict an outcome often enough, and you’re likely to be right once in a while, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

This is all a strange way, perhaps, to be talking about the threats of new viruses and the chances of another pandemic.

Look back at the not-too-distant past, and you can find a number of viruses that looked like they could have caused pandemics, but didn’t go global: there was MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome, which first appeared in 2012. SARS, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus caused a flurry of preventative measures in 2002-04, and actually reached a global alert status from the World Health Organization in 2003.

The H1N1 swine flu actually became a pandemic in 2009, creating a rush on vaccinations, and killed an estimated 284,000 worldwide before the pandemic was officially declared to have ended in 2010.

Viruses are tricky, changing things, and all of the ones mentioned above had the opportunity to spread globally, but either were stopped or failed to successfully adapt.

Then came COVID-19.

Mention the virus that brought much of the world to a stop, and you’re bound to get a variety of opinions, but the confirmed number of deaths from the virus worldwide has reached above seven million, and that rate continues to slowly rise, with 3,000 deaths worldwide in the first 28 days of April alone. There are likely more: not all COVID deaths are believed to have been accounted for, through lack of testing in some regions.

Dire early predictions about the virus as it spread in China — the same sorts of concerns about the other viruses above — turned out to be more than accurate.

Now, there’s a new kid in virus-town.

The H5N1 bird flu has taken root in Texas cattle country, with virus fragments even found in cows’ milk. The virus has been found in dairy operations in six different states, namely Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas.

Last week, though, marked a new benchmark for the virus: there was scientific proof that the virus had adapted to spread from birds to cows, and sometimes (though rarely) from birds to humans, but for the first time, there’s a confirmed case of a cow-to-human transmission.

The concern is that the virus is evolving, as viruses do — and that’s especially a concern because H5N1 is classed as a highly pathogenic virus, meaning it spreads quickly and easily.

None of that means a new pandemic is lurking around the corner — although the World Health Organization is warning the virus has to be watched closely. The fact is that the way to get out in front of any potential pandemic is to do the necessary legwork on how and why a virus is spreading.

And the research that needs to be done — and is being done — isn’t always solely applicable to the virus that’s being studied.

Research that was done in the past on MERS actually gave researchers a leg-up on treatments for COVID, because of their work the role of a spike protein in MERS. A similar spike-protein mechanism in COVID helped that virus enter human cells.

It’s fashionable for some reason right now to demean scientific expertise — in fact, to demean any kind of specialized knowledge. We forget at our peril that a tremendous amount of work is being on viruses like H5N1, precisely to keep them from becoming pandemics.

And we can’t afford to stop that clock.