In this week’s edition, we explain how Spain is continuously fighting on numerous fronts to prevent diseases passed from animals to humans from spreading and leading to another pandemic, as the world hopes for the hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks to end soon.
For the past few weeks, forest rangers in Barcelona have been laying out nets, placing down cages and unholstering their sniper rifles, all with the aim of killing Collserola Natural Park’s entire wild boar population as quickly as possible.
As extreme as this may seem, there’s a justified reason for it: to halt the transmission of African Swine Fever (ASF) and resume pork exports from the affected area as soon as possible.
African Swine Fever cannot be transmitted to humans, but the outbreak does serve as an example of how Spain is increasingly fighting the spread of potentially deadly and life-disrupting diseases on many fronts.
Following the recent hantavirus crisis, diseases that animals transmit to humans have made their way back into the news cycle.
Mice that transmit hantavirus, birds that spread avian flu, monkeys that infect with monkeypox, Ebola from fruit bats and so on.
They are known as zoonoses, infectious diseases that spread from vertebrate animals to humans.
They kill millions of people every year worldwide, and in Spain hospital admissions for zoonoses have tripled in the last 15 years.
The main causes for this include climate change, changes in land use and globalisation.
The hantavirus crisis – which this month saw a cruise ship dock in the Canary Islands and international passengers evacuated to their countries – appears at present to be under control.
Now it’s Ebola which global epidemiologists are concerned about after an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed at least 160 lives, with over 670 suspected cases reported.
“There will be cases of Ebola in Spain, but the risk of an epidemic is very low,” Joan Carles March, a specialist in Public Health and Preventive Medicine, told Spanish newspaper Última Hora, while insisting that it cannot be compared to Covid-19.
Spanish authorities do seem to be very aware of the possibility of another disease like the coronavirus grinding the globe to a halt again.
Last month, the Health Ministry together with the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food all signed a collaboration agreement for the management of risks associated with zoonoses under the new “One Health” approach.
The aim is to strengthen coordination and improve the response to emerging health threats, as successfully demonstrated with the hantavirus in the Canaries, the West Nile virus in Andalusia or the monkeypox outbreaks in different parts of the country.
Some of these are ongoing health threats which don’t make the news as much in Spain, in part because efforts are being made to prevent the spread in a country that could act as a gateway for such diseases.
“We are at a crossroads between Europe and Africa,” said Spanish Agriculture Minister Lluis Planas about Spain’s geographic location and its role in the spread of zoonoses.
“The most recent scientific reports show that three out of every four new diseases may originate from zoonosis.
“Are we in a position to be ready in time? I hope so. We are dedicating a lot of effort to it”.
Planas highlighted that Spain has had a national surveillance and response plan for vector-borne zoonoses (mosquitoes, ticks, fleas) since 2023, but he acknowledged that “we must redouble our efforts not only at the national level, but also at the European and international levels.”
Just this Friday, Barcelona’s Public Health head warned that a new strain of bird flu has been detected that could prove lethal to humans.
We mention this not to be alarmist, but just as another example of the often overlooked efforts epidemiologists, virologists and health officials go to, acting accordingly to protect our public health.
Nobody wants another pandemic, but the world is pretty much the same to how it was pre-Covid.
There are so many of us inhabiting this planet, we live in close proximity to each other, and we move around a lot.
