In Namibia, vets are monitoring “zoonotic” diseases that jump from animals to humans in a bid to prevent the next pandemic. Just this week, the World Health Assembly has adopted a new Pandemic Treaty. But as Trump’s ‘America First’ approach sees the US withdraw from international treaties and cut global health funding, how can scientists track and intercept diseases that do not recognise borders?
Leandra Van Zyl, a 27-year-old veterinarian from Namibia, has turned a lifelong fascination with wild animals into a thrilling career.
With her father behind the wheel of a jeep, she ventures into the African bush day and night, collecting blood, fecal, and tissue samples from jackals, hyenas, zebras, hippos, and lions. If an animal shows signs of illness, she dons a hazmat suit and proceeds with a surgical extraction. Sometimes, hunters or herders summon her after discovering an injured or dead animal.
Vet Leandra Van Zyl prepares the antidote and vitamins to wake an antelope up. Narcotizing animals helps vets to get samples and check the presence of eventual viruses that could infect humans. In this case, samples are taken to Central Veterinary Laboratory in Windhoek to be processed.
“I love that I can help animals in need,” says Van Zyl as she draws blood from an anesthetized antelope. “There is nothing as gratifying as seeing that I have made a positive difference in an animal’s life, helped it recover or even saved its life.”
When not in the bush collecting specimens, Van Zyl works at the Central Veterinary Laboratory in Windhoek, Namibia. She is one of a wave of vets on the frontlines of disease surveillance across Africa.
At Windhoek Central Veterinary Laboratory, Namibia, Veterinary Technician places samples into centrifuge separating serum from the corpuscular part to test for antibodies.
There is ample scientific evidence that more than 70% of new, emerging, and re-emerging infectious diseases originate from animals, especially wildlife.
Scientifically known as zoonotic in nature, these diseases can jump from animals to humans in a variety of ways, which includes vectors like ticks or mosquitoes, or transmission through food, contaminated water, and bodily fluids. Think rabies, Lyme disease and salmonella, but also Ebola, HIV and various strains of influenza.
Covid-19 is generally considered to have originated from a zoonotic spillover event, although the specific origin of its jump from animal to human is still uncertain.
Your own risk and susceptibility to diseases passed from animals to humans depends on where you live and the habitat that surrounds you.
Zoonotic diseases, scientists say, are responsible for about 2.5 billion cases of human illnesses every year.
Infectious diseases know no boundaries
Over the last few decades, experts have recorded an uptick of infectious diseases in parts of the world where they never existed before.
Outbreaks of African swine fever, for instance, a viral disease that affects pigs and has spread from Africa to Europe, have posed steep financial costs to the pork industry across the continent. While cases of malaria, dengue, and Rift Valley Fever—all mosquito-borne diseases once endemic to the tropics only—are now appearing in southern Europe, North America, and other areas.
Umberto Molini, an Italian veterinarian with the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell’Abruzzo e del Molise (IZS)—a zoonotic research institute in Teramo, Italy— says that a warming planet and globalization are drivers of infectious diseases. The latter implies deforestation, urbanization, commercial trade, tourism, and intensive farming. All these activities impact animal, human, and plant ecosystems.
“Global warming has changed where aerial animals live and it has fueled desertification. This means that wildlife is more frequently in contact with domestic animals especially when searching for water sources, and wild animals host more than 1,000 viruses that we don’t even know,” says Molini.
“Now, with globalization, transporting animals is much faster. Animals from Africa used to come to Europe in a container by boat, and now they arrive by cargo [plane] in just a few hours. All it takes is one infected animal.”
To make matters worse, many infectious diseases are becoming drug resistant. This phenomenon, known as antimicrobial resistance or AMR, happens when germs stop responding to medicines that used to kill them—like antibiotics. Overuse of antibiotics in animals, especially in intensive farming, is one of the drivers of AMR.
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“Antibiotics are fed to animals to increase production. People eat them and some go into the water systems. With this type of resistance, it is much harder to mitigate disease outbreaks,” says Soushieta Jagadesh, a public health expert with The International Society of Infectious Diseases (ISID).
Stronger together for human, animal and plant health
This complex web of factors is what prompted the Teramo IZS to forge a partnership with Van Zyl’s laboratory in Namibia 40 years ago. It was the first of many such partnerships across Africa for IZS Teramo.
In 2017, they launched the Enhancing Research for Africa Network (ERFAN), a scientific network that consolidates relationships between Italy and over 34 research institutes and veterinary laboratories across 18 African countries.
ERFAN members study zoonotic diseases across sub-Saharan Africa that have the highest potential to jump species and spread. They do so through a ‘One Health’ approach, a perspective that recognizes that human, animal and plant health are interdependent and bound to the health of the ecosystems in which they exist.
At the heart of this approach is the understanding that international collaboration is essential to prevent, prepare and respond to disease outbreaks, a fact that became glaringly obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have built a strong network of relationships across Africa,” says Nicola D’Alterio, executive director of IZS Teramo. “These are not ad hoc relationships that end when a project is over.”
The Italian institutes led by IZS Teramo strengthen the capacity of veterinary services across Africa through the exchange of innovation and expertise.
“Today, unlike 1,000 years ago, the plague does not take decades to reach the other side of the world,” says D’Alterio. “Now it can happen in a matter of six hours. You must know what is going on around the world and what that means for you.”
In a globalized economy, where food, animals and people move quickly from one part of the world to another, disease surveillance is in everyone’s best interest.
Namibia, for instance, is the only African country that currently exports beef to Europe, the US, Russia and China.
Molini’s first deployment to Namibia was centered around meat certification, testing to ensure livestock was free of pathogens. Strengthening the capacity of African scientists to do this work is one the goals of the Teramo institute.
Lauren M Coetzee, a Namibian doctorate candidate in molecular biology with IZS Teramo and a student of Molini’s, studies the genetic makeup of domestic and wild animals.
“Our livestock comes into contact with wild animals often. This can give rise to new emerging diseases unknown to the outside world,” she says. “My research focuses on the animal-human interface. I study the evolution of diseases in both domestic and wild animals that can spillover into the human population.”
Engaging communities in preventing infectious diseases
Wild animals such as bats and monkeys are potential hosts to many diseases that can spillover into the human population, including HIV, Nipah Virus and Ebola. However, populations that coexist with wildlife have often relied on it as a source of animal protein.
Meat from wildlife species, known as bushmeat, has always been hunted for consumption or a cash commodity. Over the years, governments have tried to regulate it, but poaching persists across Africa.
Jagadesh, who has studied the links between disease outbreaks and conservation in West Africa, says bans on animal products rarely work. “When something is illegal it becomes more of a delicacy in urban markets because people want to show off their wealth,” she says.
And outright bans—unless the species is endangered, like the pangolin—make it, “harder to track down animal origins because hunting and trade goes under the radar.”
Pangolins for sale at a bushmeat market in Anyinam, Ghana.
When a wildlife species is popular, like the grasscutter, a large rodent in Ghana, some people decide to breed it for profit. “In France they eat frogs because they are considered a delicacy. In Africa, one of our delicacies is the grasscutter,” says Francis Michael Pobimensa, a former naval officer turned grasscutter breeder in Accra, Ghana.
“People call it king rat, but these are not rats. They are closer to porcupines than rats and are ferocious eaters.” When this type of activity is regulated, and the animals are vaccinated and healthy, it can contribute to preventing disease outbreaks while catering to local food preferences.
Since banning rarely works, Jagadesh advocates instead for combining policy regulations with education of communities and hunters. Namibia is one country that has successfully engaged communities in the prevention of diseases.
A program in the Northern Communal Areas region reached 2,800 farmers and focused on preventing and managing rabies as well as three diseases that can decimate herds.
The farmers were trained to recognize the clinical signs of these diseases and report anything suspicious to the closest veterinary offices for investigation. The program not only empowered communities, but also strengthened the early warning and response systems for disease control.
Policy regulations, explains Jagadesh, can be applied to hunting by setting limits on when, what and how much to hunt. And educating hunters is as important as educating communities.
A zebra killed by a hunter. While hunting animals is controversial and complex, in Namibia many say it is a vital part of conservation and contributes to the economic sustainability of mixed farming operations, private game farms, and more importantly, communal conservancies.
In Namibia, says Van Zyl, “When professional hunters get their licenses, they are trained to identify things that don’t look right in the animals they catch or find. If they see something suspicious, they call the veterinary services. If the animal is infected, they will condemn the carcass, and the meat will be destroyed.”
In Ghana, “hunting is forbidden during the breeding season for bats because of the higher potential of animal to human disease transmission,” says Jagadesh. Regulations also apply to open-air markets, she adds.
Food safety officers and veterinary services regularly inspect fresh and dried bushmeat before sale in trade hubs in Kumasi, Accra, and Techiman, where a lot of bushmeat is traded.
More funding needed to address global health security
On May 20 2025, the World Health Assembly adopted the Pandemic Agreement, after three long years of negotiations among World Health Organization (WHO) member states. This historic agreement, launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, aligns WHO member states around a ‘One Health’ global approach to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.
Nations now have a clearer roadmap to boost global cooperation through research, diseases surveillance, technology transfer, and a skilled health workforce. What they don’t have are the financial commitments and legal mechanisms to enforce this agreement.
Experts estimate that a minimum investment of $124 billion over five years is needed to strengthen the health security of all countries.
The adoption of the agreement in Geneva was a key test of global political will, especially around the need for sustainable funding for pandemic preparedness and response.
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Notably absent from the World Health Assembly this year: the United States. Since he started his second term, President Donald J Trump has pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation, gutted foreign assistance and terminated most global health programs.
Once the leader in global health security and largest donor, the US is now sitting on the bench.
Yet the threat of future disease outbreaks looms. And in terms of the next pandemic, scientists agree it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”.
Detecting diseases before they spread is the often invisible but vital work of researchers like Van Zyl, Molini and ERFAN members.
“Prevention is a victim of its own success,” says D’Alterio. “When nothing happens, it means it’s working. What we do in peacetime is critical, and we must never let our guard down. This isn’t like being a heart surgeon on center stage. We work quietly, away from the spotlight.”
Words by Beatrice M. Spadacini and Photographs by Stefano Schirato
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