Even before the COVID19 pandemic, Emerging Infectious Diseases in humans, livestock and crops cost humanity more than 1 trillion dollars a year in production losses and treatment costs, more than the GDP of all but 15 countries. The global economic collapse associated with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic underscored that the traditional approach of crisis response is not simply expensive, it is failing. Finding an effective action plan for risk management requires new risk assessment. Novel evolutionary insights about pathogens, based on what is called the Stockholm Paradigm, link the potential for emerging infectious disease outbreaks directly to climate change. Highly specialized pathogens evolve in localized settings in association with one or a few hosts. Climate change and ecological disruption alters geographic distributions and ecological connections, bringing pathogens into contact with susceptible but previously unexposed hosts. This has been true throughout the history of life on this planet. Human activities during the past 15,000 years, including domestication and agriculture, population growth, conflict and migration, urbanization and globalization have all increased the risk of emerging diseases. Technological humanity now faces an existential crisis. The risk space for emerging diseases is much greater than we realized, so we need to begin to find them before they find us. The DAMA (document – assess – monitor – act) Protocol links activities from neighborhood gardens to global surveillance systems that can allow us to anticipate to mitigate emerging disease. We can lower costs to society, limiting the global impact of pathogens and slowing the expanding and accelerating crisis, while buying time for traditional efforts to medicate, vaccinate and eradicate.

» Daniel Brooks, University of Toronto

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