PREZODE was established in early 2021 within COVID-19 pandemic context, to support international organisations and countries across the globe, particularly low-income countries, to prevent the emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases. The article below presents the initiative’s context.
Published in the Lancet, it is cosigned by PREZODE cofounders Marisa Peyre, Gwenaël Vourc’h, Thierry Lefrançois, Yves Martin-Prevel, Jean-François Soussana and Benjamin Roche.
As of mid-February 2021, the SARS-CoV-2 virus had killed approximately 2 million people worldwide and caused profound economic damage. The ultimate consequences of this crisis are difficult to predict but, from sanitary, economic, sociological, and ecological perspectives, the toll is already substantial. Nevertheless, this threat is not new. Concerns over a global pandemic have arisen many times before, so most countries already had emergency preparedness plans in place. However, the limitations of these have been exposed by the current coronavirus pandemic. The reasons for these inadequacies are many, and point towards one misconception: contrary to current approaches, prevention strategies should be implemented before the disease emerges within human populations.
Bring together a multidisciplinary community of researchers and actors
During the last several decades, pathogen screening has been developed to anticipate the next pandemic. Although isolating new wildlife-borne pathogens is still important, it is not enough to prevent them from emerging. It is time to take a step forward—namely, by jointly deploying academic research, intersectoral collaboration in the field, and the engagement of operational actors on the front lines of outbreaks—to envision prevention strategies that lead to the reduction of risks of emergence.
A Scientific Agenda built through a participative and co-constructive process
Such a scheme is at the heart of the PREventing ZOonotic Disease Emergence (PREZODE) initiative, a French brainchild that has attracted the interest of the Tripartite Alliance (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, World Organisation for Animal Health, and WHO), as well as the UN Environment Programme, the World Bank, the European Commission, and partner countries. Announced at the One Planet Summit on Jan 11, 2021, the PREZODE initiative was prepared through a series of online workshops that convened nearly 400 researchers and public health authorities from 50 countries on all five continents.
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.