Next big challenge: Combating slate of animal-borne viruses

IN a paper published last year, scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology made an eerily prescient observation: "It is generally believed that bat-borne CoVs (coronaviruses) will re-emerge to cause the next disease outbreak," they said.

In this regard, the scientists added: "China is a likely hotspot. The challenge is to predict when and where, so that we can try our best to prevent such outbreaks." Unfortunately, two months now into the current viral epidemic, it's apparent that Beijing's public health system fell short. It failed to act at the incipient stage of the crisis and took far too long to mount countermeasures that would have contained the problem within Wuhan. Dazzling displays of resource mobilisation now won't make up for these early failures.

Just as significantly, the Communist Party leaders, at every level, have shown themselves unable to stop the flourishing trade in wild meat in the country. When the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) outbreak struck China and then spread to the rest of the world in 2003, Beijing moved to crack down on the trade. It was noted that the virus likely jumped species from bats, their natural hosts, to civets and then to humans. By the time the Sars epidemic abated, more than 8,000 people had been infected around the world and some 800 died. But the trade was allowed to resume.