In the light of the urgency raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, global investment in wildlife virology is likely to increase, and new surveillance programmes will identify hundreds of novel viruses that might someday pose a threat to humans. To support the extensive task of laboratory characterization, scientists may increasingly rely on data-driven rubrics or machine learning models that learn from known zoonoses to identify which animal pathogens could someday pose a threat to global health. We synthesize the findings of an interdisciplinary workshop on zoonotic risk technologies to answer the following questions. What are the prerequisites, in terms of open data, equity and interdisciplinary collaboration, to the development and application of those tools? What effect could the technology have on global health? Who would control that technology, who would have access to it and who would benefit from it? Would it improve pandemic prevention? Could it create new challenges?
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Infectious disease macroecology: parasite diversity and dynamics across the globe’.
The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)l is by all accounts the most sweeping and comprehensive update to U.S. food laws in seventy years, aiming to confront the reality that the nation's food supply has undergone fundamental shifts in its sources, distribution channels, and intermediate handlers. The law's intent is to prevent problems that can cause foodborne illness and enable the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to keep a record of facilities processing food for sale in the United States, a mandate that expands FDA's already global regulatory activities. 2 FSMA gives FDA broad new powers to prevent food safety problems, detect and respond to food safety issues, and improve the safety of imported foods. 3 Because the law specifically aims to update FDA authority in light of the reality of global food and food additive markets, Section 305 FSMA calls for FDA to develop a comprehensive plan to expand the "technical, scientific, and regulatory capacity of foreign governments and their respective food industries in countries that export foods to the United States." 4 Part of its plan for fulfilling its Section 305 obligation is actual presence: FDA has established overseas offices in China,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.