Pandemics such as Avian Influenza and COVID-19 show that we need to overcome human exceptionalism to prevent another ‘catastrophic moral failure’

This article was originally published by Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. Read the original article here.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, governing bodies, research institutes, and health organizations around the world reflected extensively on our (failed) responses to the pandemic, hoping to identify lessons that can be applied to the governance of future pandemics. As various bird flu strains are spreading across the world. Without understanding people’s behaviour and decision-making processes related to animals, it will be impossible to respond appropriately to the next pandemic.

Only four years ago, much of the world came out of its first lockdown after the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe. People hastily stocked up on essentials, found coping mechanisms to deal with isolation, and showed their appreciation for healthcare providers working on the frontline. Many people died; many more fell ill. At the time, the pandemic had a profound impact on us, changing our behaviour and views of the present, past, and future.

There has been much high–level reflection on the pandemic since then, for example about how we can prevent ourselves from making the same series of mistakes that led to the devastating pandemic and the significant loss of life, especially among marginalized populations lacking access to healthcare (something we wrote about in the Conversation in May 2020). The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2021 similarly remarked how our way of handling the pandemic as a collective can be seen as a ‘catastrophic moral failure’ with a profound impact on the world’s poor. In making this claim, he highlighted the impact of unequal access to healthcare, vaccines, and livelihood support. And now, our collective response to the current avian influenza (‘bird flu’) pandemic shows that we risk making the same mistakes we did then.

Novel, much more deadly pandemics
While some lessons may have been learned, there is increasing disquiet among professionals that the world has not learned enough, in the best case scenario, or, in the worst case, has blatantly ignored warning signs of novel pandemic threats, of which Avian Influenza (the H5N1 virus or ‘bird flu’) is currently the most likely candidate.

There is good reason to take this virus seriously. Outbreaks have occurred sporadically throughout the past century; however, the current pandemic has arguably been ongoing since 1995, when it was recognized that the ‘epizootic’, or outbreak of animal disease, dwarfed the bird flu outbreaks until then. In the past months devastating images from Antarctica have shown that the disease has now affected virtually every ecosystem in the world. Besides the risk to humans, bird and other animal populations have been devastatingly affected by the disease, including some species which are already struggling for their existence.

At the end of April 2024, an article in the Washington Post sounded the alarm: after two human casualties in the United States, the risk of a new, much more deadly pandemic seems to be edging ever closer. The writers mention the frustration among officials and experts that not more is done in terms of testing and data sharing, drawing parallels with some of the failures that occurred at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These conclusions dangerously ignore the fact that the disease has already caused the death of millions of non-human animals, in addition to 463 human deaths out of 889 human cases across 23 countries. Besides highlighting the geographic health inequalities through expressing only concern for human health in the Global North, they also ignore the realities of the biological interconnectedness of animals and humans whereby the majority of emerging infectious diseases are transmissible between animal and human populations. The result of this messaging is that animals are routinely blamed for disease outbreaks and are considered a disease ‘risk’, which ignores the fact that zoonoses spread largely as a result of human behaviour, such as through industrial intensive farming systems and deforestation.

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated the global revisiting of existing approaches to the interlinkages of animal and human health, strengthening systems approaches such as Ecohealth, Planetary Health and One Health, the latter of which earned its very own high–level panel consisting of animal, human, and ecosystem health experts. The panel includes social scientists as well, as the importance of including social science to outbreak responses is increasingly acknowledged; now this needs to become more pronounced within One Health approaches.

Towards a more inclusive approach
What we can learn from reflections about the COVID-19 pandemic — a conclusion that should be guiding our response to Avian Influenza — is that no-one is safe until everyone is safe, including marginalized populations such as animals; understanding our relationship with the animal world is key to responding effectively, as well as to developing intersectoral and transdisciplinary responses.

The negative impacts of animal and human disease are greatest in poor populations depending on agriculture and livestock for their livelihood; therefore, poverty reduction needs to be part of disease prevention activities. Facilitating testing for animal disease requires providing insurance and compensation to animal owners, who otherwise may lose essential livelihoods through diseased livestock. Most importantly however, industrial farming needs to be rapidly scaled down, which requires large-scale, and potentially costly, sustainable solutions for farmers. This will simultaneously address a range of increasing health challenges beyond the risk of pandemics, including the existential risks of anti-microbial resistance, pollution, and biodiversity loss.

Without understanding people’s behaviour and decision-making processes related to animals, it will be impossible to respond appropriately to the next pandemic. And without more drastic measures to increase interspecies health equality, it is unlikely that we can prevent or respond effectively.