Current Healthcare Workers Might Face Another Pandemic
November 1, 2023 2 minutes read
By Gary Evans
As evidence mounts indicating that climate change is driving emerging infections, healthcare workers may face another pandemic in their lifetime — possibly in their current careers.
“I think the best way to prepare for a new pathogen for healthcare workers is to ensure adequate access to protective personal equipment [PPE], which will vary by pathogen transmission routes,” says Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco. “For example, universal precautions for bloodborne pathogens, and N95 masks for airborne pathogens.”
Rather infamously, PPE was in short supply — in part because the strategic stockpile had not been properly maintained — when COVID-19 hit the United States in the spring of 2020.
“I also think that healthcare workers should be first in line for the receipt of vaccines for a new pathogen once developed — as they were during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Gandhi tells Hospital Employee Health.
That means a triumph of science over misinformation will be critical, as even some healthcare workers — who saw patients sick and dying of COVID-19 — quit rather than be immunized against SARS-CoV-2.
While there are exceptions and matters of epidemiologic definition, the historic bookmarks for pandemics are almost exactly a century apart: 1918 H1N1 influenza A and COVID-19 in 2019. When is the next one?
In addition to global warming, there are related and contributing problems of deforestation, rapid global travel, and the movement of migrant populations, particularly from rural to urban or peri-urban environments, said Caroline Buckee, PhD, professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“If you were going to design a perfect system to spread a pandemic, you would put everybody in very close proximity in cities and then connect them by global travel as much as you can,” Buckee said during a recent webinar. “That’s exactly what we have. We have people in closer proximity with environments where we have a huge diversity of potentially zoonotic emergence events. We’ve created a system that is not only driven by climate, it’s also setting us up for [more] and worse pandemics. That’s something I think about a lot.”1
Deforestation creates encroachment on animal habitats and increases the likelihood of a “spillover” of zoonotic infections into human populations, said Marcia Castro, PhD, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan.
“As deforestation happens, humans get closer to this huge reservoir of viruses that are in the forest in different kinds of animal species,” Castro said. “The possibility of a new zoonosis emerging is also very high. In fact, I think we lucked out that nothing has emerged as a greater problem so far.”
REFERENCE
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Confronting the link between climate change and infectious diseases. May 8, 2023.
As evidence mounts indicating that climate change is driving emerging infections, healthcare workers may face another pandemic in their lifetime — possibly in their current careers.
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