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https://substack.fixthenews.com/p/349-amnesty-flamingo-revolution-torricelli>
"Hi everyone, Gus here. Earlier this week, I sat down with Pardis Sabeti, a
Harvard geneticist who has spent two decades building systems to catch
pandemics before they start. We wanted to know what she knows about the Ebola
outbreak that’s happening right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
already the second-largest in the disease’s 50-year history and the
fastest-growing on record.
It didn’t have to be like this. Sabeti and her longtime collaborator, Christian
Happi, built Sentinel on a simple premise: most “emerging” diseases aren’t
emerging, they’re just not being tested for. In 2014, the diagnostic labs
they’d built in Sierra Leone and Nigeria for Lassa fever caught Ebola before
almost anyone else in the world. Last year, Sentinel helped Rwanda contain a
Marburg outbreak with a fatality rate that was less than half the historical
average.
This time though, it’s been different. Conflict, the collapse in global health
funding, and the withdrawal of international peacekeepers created exactly the
kinds of conditions outbreaks thrive in. Sabeti’s own team lost a large share
of its staff to funding cuts last summer, months before the DRC outbreak took
hold.
Some of what she told us is unsettling, some of it is reassuring. There are
still thousands of scientists and health workers around the world working on
ways to catch the next big pandemic early. And after 18 months of losing
ground, their network recently got its biggest boost yet. In November, Sentinel
won $100 million from the MacArthur Foundation, its first major infusion since
the cuts hit.
Here’s my conversation with her."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
