How can we prevent the next pandemic?

John Tregoning is an Infectious Disease Researcher and was interivewed by Sally Le Page about his advice on how we can best prevent pandemics in the future.

John - We can't. There will be other pandemics. The biggest threat at the moment is actually bacteria that we can't treat with antibiotics. That's a kind of slow burn pandemic. It's similar to the kind of global heating problem that we're seeing. We can develop better tools to deal with them quicker so we can make vaccines faster, and we can understand how to contain them. The reason why SARS spread so quickly is because people were spreading it when they were asymptomatic, so you could basically be infected, pass it to somebody else, and maintain this invisible mass of viruses. So the short and not very optimistic answer is that 'no there will be more pandemics. We just have to build the toolkit to deal with them once they happen.'