VIDEO: PREZODE, an international initiative to prevent zoonosis emergence

Thanks to a bottom-up, co-construction and scientific method, the initiative enables the implementation of risk-reduction public policies and actions to reduce pandemic risks. Based on the One Health approach, it facilitates knowledge sharing and is a resource center for decision-makers, while ensuring food security and livelihoods for the population at risk.

Through its community of practice, PREZODE improves coordination and synergies, lessons learned and best practice sharing. It strengthens and integrates knowledge, innovation, capacity building and operational actions. It deploys academic research, cross-sectoral collaboration in the field, and engagement of operational actors on the frontline of epidemics, considering both livestock and wildlife.

1. The Context

2. Prevention

3. Co-construction

The context

Zoonosis are infectious diseases that spread between animals and humans. They account for more than 2/3rd of human emerging diseases on Earth.

The greatest burden on human health and livelihoods, amounting globally to about 1 billion cases of illness and millions of deaths every year, is caused by epidemic and endemic zoonoses that are persistent regional health problems around the world. Zoonoses have their origin in pathogens hosted by animals (wildlife and domestic animals) and are a substantial threat to global health and global security. They have caused economic damages exceeding hundreds of billions of US dollars in the past 20 years and this number will still rise with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already a cost estimated at more than 11,700 billion dollars. Zoonotic agents also represent the largest number of infectious disease agents in humans and projections indicate that their number might significantly increase in the future.

Thus, it is now time to act far ahead of epidemic and pandemic crises by implementing ambitious scientific and operational programs dedicated to the prevention of zoonotic diseases' emergence and spread, before they have reached human populations.

Prevention

The most efficient way to tackle emergence risk and stop pandemics is prevention. This is the heart of PREZODE.

Providing robust, cost-effective, and sensitive pathogen surveillance in wild and domestic animals, and installing early warning systems for infectious disease outbreaks in animals and humans are key to implementing scientific evidence-based prevention policies. This approach allows a rapid response to emerging zoonotic diseases at the source, and thus, increases the effectiveness of interventions. It also enlightens trends and changes in emerging disease patterns and helps develop cost-effective multisectoral response plans. Surveillance systems and prevention must take socioeconomic constraints and the needs of local actors into account. Anticipating what could happen before coming out of the wildlife is innovative.

Co-Construction

An innovative co-designed approach to ensure effective prevention.

One of the PREZODE initiative's main innovative approaches relies on a paradigm shift. A co-construction process, engaging all stakeholders, from local to international levels involved in the prevention of emerging risks: health professionals (from the animal, human, and environmental sectors), researchers, field operators, or decision makers from both the private and public sectors. This bottom-up co-construction approach is requisite to build solutions and surveillance systems involving people and communities on the front line of risks.

PREZODE held co-construction workshops in 2021 and 2022 in nine areas in the world^[1], to build its scientific agenda. Approximately 1,800 contributors from 128 countries were identified throughout the different workshops. In addition to the international scale of this process, different sectors were represented among participants/actors, which brought an intersectoral scale to the co-construction process.

[1] Central Africa, Europe, the Indian Ocean, Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern Africa/Middle East, Southern Asia, Southeast Asia/East Asia and the Pacific, Southern, and Eastern Africa, USA/Canada, and Western Africa.