I recommend the book "Spillover" about zoonotic diseases. Given it was written pre-covid, it was insanely prescient - it expressed, for example, huge concern about bat viruses and RNA viruses.
Aanyway, it writes a lot about how these diseases are investigated, at the frontline in remote African villages. It gives a great idea of just how hard they are to investigate.
By the time researchers get news of an outbreak and arrive, the outbreak might well be over, the patients recovered or, well, dead. No one remembers what they were doing 4-6 weeks prior, when they would have contracted the virus. The village may also also be a site, still, of a medical disaster, with inadequate medical facilities, and you don't know how the germs spread - via air, water, contact, contaminated food? It's like investigating a crime while it is still being committed.
I'm not sure what my point is, other than, kudos to the people who do it. Also, this painstaking work gets to an answer eventually, but it necessarily takes a long time, and probably goes down few dead ends too.
It's incredible the amount of work that goes into protecting the world from dangers it barely understands as a whole.
And the scary thing is, one bumbling loudmouth politician can Duning-Kruger us into a major catastrophe by throwing a wrench in this sort of essential work.
The COVID pandamic did trail by a few years the de-funding of pandemic prevention efforts by Trump in his last presidency.
Aanyway, it writes a lot about how these diseases are investigated, at the frontline in remote African villages. It gives a great idea of just how hard they are to investigate.
By the time researchers get news of an outbreak and arrive, the outbreak might well be over, the patients recovered or, well, dead. No one remembers what they were doing 4-6 weeks prior, when they would have contracted the virus. The village may also also be a site, still, of a medical disaster, with inadequate medical facilities, and you don't know how the germs spread - via air, water, contact, contaminated food? It's like investigating a crime while it is still being committed.
I'm not sure what my point is, other than, kudos to the people who do it. Also, this painstaking work gets to an answer eventually, but it necessarily takes a long time, and probably goes down few dead ends too.