![]() The government could spend a few hundred million dollars and buy every American 10 of these that they could use throughout the year - it’s like filter paper and a lancet. We have tools that we are developing in my lab, some initially invented by collaborators like Steve Elledge here at Harvard, that use a drop of blood, just a finger prick. GAZETTE:The key would be that we’re not waiting for people to get sick or for someone to notice that several people have gotten sick with something that they don’t recognize? It would be a routine scan of people’s blood collected for other procedures? That would have saved tens of thousands of lives and perhaps prevented that major outbreak in New York. The constantly recording devices of our immune system would be interpreted and read out, “Hey, it looks like there’s a new coronavirus spreading in Wuhan.” Or, in late January, “It looks like there are some people with what looks like a new virus popping up in New York City.” And then you would read the news and say, “There’s a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan,” put two and two together, and Governor Cuomo would have had the firepower to close down the city in early February instead of March. That would create a robust surveillance program. But we have the tools to actually go into our blood and say, “What has Michael recorded today in terms of infectious disease exposures? He didn’t get sick, but maybe he got exposed to something.” We could start doing that for millions of people every single day. The problem is that it’s really hard to uncover what we have recorded. We’re all just USB sticks, always recording. MINA:I think of every individual as a recording device. GAZETTE:From those immune responses, we’d know what is circulating out there? It would be a daily churn, running lots of different tests to look at people’s immune responses. ![]() This could be supported by federal governments or by industry or the Department of Defense. It would be a massive, everyday surveillance program using ready-to-access blood samples from blood banks or hospitals that are about to be thrown away - there are tons of ways to get blood samples in the world. One would be rapid identification of new infectious diseases. It would run all the time in the background and would allow two things. It would be a “collective global good” sort of program to help prevent - or at least rapidly identify - the next pandemic so that we can respond quickly. We don’t need physicians working on this problem we really need engineers and epidemiologists and mathematicians. MINA:An immunological observatory, a global immune observatory, would be a massive engineering feat, the likes of which may be compared - at least in my vision - to the weather system. GAZETTE:What would such a surveillance system look like? But in what I would consider more ordinary times, a virus should be something that all people on earth can rally around. ![]() We didn’t see it in this pandemic, unfortunately, primarily because our president couldn’t even unite people in one country. We can work together - across countries - in a way that betters societies everywhere. One of those steps is building up proper surveillance. We can build up new public health infrastructure to tackle it once it starts spreading. We can build tools to find it quickly and to act fast. We can act now to put us in a position so that when the next pandemic does happen, we don’t have to allow it to get out of control. MINA:Pandemics are going to happen, but we can absolutely prevent the devastation that occurs from a pandemic. GAZETTE:Is it possible to prevent the next pandemic? If not, can we better prepare for it? Mina’s work revolves around disease testing and the development of new technologies to better understand the population and immunological consequences and patterns underlying infectious diseases. Chan School of Public Health, a member of the School’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, and associate medical director in clinical microbiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Pathology Department. Michael Mina is assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. In this series, the Gazette asks Harvard experts for concrete solutions to complex problems.
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