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In 2022, over 55 million birds across the United States died from bird flu, making it the worst ever outbreak in the country. As climate change and human encroachment on animal habitats bring humans and animals into ever closer contact, the risk of animal diseases infecting humans – zoonotic diseases – grows.

We have already experienced these devastating effects with the 2009 swine flu pandemic, the 2014-15 zika virus epidemic that affected North and South America, and the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, as well as rabies, which kills approximately 59,000 people worldwide every year. Studies have shown that an estimated 60 percent of known infectious diseases and up to 75 percent of new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin.

Is the current epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza a threat to human health? What factors are driving animal-to-human transmission of these diseases? What global policies and practices do we need to adopt to curb these cross-species infections? Join Perry World House for a thought-provoking discussion on the potential impact of diseases such as avian influenza, swine flu, Ebola, and SARS-CoV-2, which all emerged from animal sources, and how to prevent them.

Speakers

Andrew Hoffman serves as the thirteenth dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine. An acclaimed researcher, clinician, teacher, and mentor, Hoffman is a large animal veterinarian who devoted his career to clinical service and research focused on lung diseases including new therapies for emphysema and asthma; later he directed the Regenerative Medicine Laboratory at Tufts University before arriving to Penn in 2018. He is principal investigator and founder of the Extracellular Vesicle Core (EV Core) at Penn. Hoffman is chair of the Climate Change Task Force for the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges, exploring climate change and health education. He serves on the Advisory Council of the Environmental Innovations Initiative at Penn. Under Hoffman’s deanship, the Institute for Infectious and Zoonotic Diseases, Center for Stewardship Agriculture and Food Security, and the Wildlife Futures Program were launched, which intersect on issues of climate drivers of zoonotic diseases, food insecurity, and loss of biodiversity. Recently, he attended COP27 as an observer and presenter as part of the Penn delegation.

Louise H. Moncla is an assistant professor of pathobiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Moncla’s research draws on tools from phylodynamics, virology, and population genetics to understand how viruses evolve within individuals, between populations, and across continents. The ultimate goal of her work is to better understand viral evolution and transmission to prevent new outbreaks from occurring and mitigate the toll of endemic viral transmission. Although her lab primarily uses computational methods, it also generates new genomic data and draws on tools from basic virology to validate its computational findings.

Moderator

Benjamin Mueller is a health reporter for the New York Times. He has lately been covering Covid, with a focus on vaccine development, the mortality impacts of the pandemic, and the origins of the virus. He was previously a correspondent for the Times in Britain, where he covered the path of the virus in Europe, the evolution of the coronavirus, and global vaccine distribution efforts. He began his career at the Times as a law enforcement reporter, and was awarded a Society of Silurians Medallion for coverage of a killing of police officers. He graduated in 2013 from Yale, where he studied literature and worked in psychology labs.