Like a lot of our pandemic planning, the creation of this program was triggered by fears surrounding the emergence of the H5N1 bird flu in 2005.105 Over its first ten years, PREDICT funded about sixty labs that became part of an ambitious global alliance to find viruses in animals that had the potential to leap into humans. Through this effort, a network of scientists collected and examined more than 140,000 biological samples from animals, identifying about 1,000 viruses that were never before cataloged. Among them was a new strain of Ebola.106 In 2016, PREDICT helped find a virus in China
...more

