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Well before the world began grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers were already looking out for potential outbreaks from emerging diseases—and trying to stop them. A major hurdle in doing so is understanding which viruses in animals are most likely to make the jump to people. A new, interactive web-based tool, published April 5 in PNAS, uses 32 risk factors and data on more than 500,000 samples taken from nearly 75,000 animals, along with public records of virus detections in wildlife, to rank the chances of spillover among 887 viruses.
Project leader Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist and disease ecologist at the University of California, Davis’s School of Veterinary Medicine, spoke with The Scientist about the “SpillOver” tool that she and her collaborators developed.
Jonna Mazet: For more than a decade, I have been the PI and leader of the PREDICT Consortium, which is a very large ...
