Preparing for 'the next great epidemic' in 2005
Dr. David Butler-Jones talked to The Current about preparing for the unknown pandemics of the future
Long before a coronavirus pandemic brought regular life to a sudden halt across the globe, infectious disease experts knew such an event would eventually happen even if the specific virus culprit wasn't known that far in advance.
"The next great epidemic we face may not even be an influenza, it may be some other thing like a new SARS or some other virus," said Dr. David Butler-Jones, who was then Canada's chief public health officer, during a discussion that aired on CBC Radio's The Current on Feb. 4, 2005.
"So, we have to be planning as if any one of these might happen."
Back then, Canadians had seen SARS claim the lives of dozens of people within the country just two years earlier. But the impact of a global pandemic was something less tangibly understood by most at that time.
From a historical perspective, Butler-Jones said "the biggest epidemics that humankind has faced" have originated in animals and then ended up being infections that spread among humans.
"But over the span of, you know, 10,000 years, there's just a couple handful of those," he clarified.
Butler-Jones said the bottom line was, it was necessary for officials — in Canada and elsewhere — to prepare for whatever pandemic would occur in the future, regardless of its origin.
"Hopefully it won't be for a long time and that gives us even more time to prepare, but if it were to happen in a week, or 10 months or whatever, we need to be planning along the ways that we can respond as effectively as possible," he said.
The World Health Organization would a declare a pandemic in 2009, as a result of the spread of the H1N1 flu. The current coronavirus pandemic arrived barely a decade after that.