Animal industries in the United States pose serious risk of future pandemics and the US government lacks a comprehensive strategy to address these threats, a new study concludes.

The analysis calls for tightening existing regulations and implementing new ones in order to prevent zoonotic-driven outbreaks.

The report is the first to comprehensively map networks of animal commerce that fuel zoonotic disease risk in the US. It analyzes 36 different animal industries, including fur-farming, the exotic pet trade, hunting and trapping, industrial animal agriculture, backyard chicken production, roadside zoos, and more, to assess the risks each poses of generating a large-scale disease outbreak.

The report states, far from being a problem that only exists elsewhere, many high-risk interactions between humans and animals that happen routinely and customarily inside the US could spark future pandemics. All of the animal industries the report examines are far less regulated than they should be and far less than the public believes they currently are. Today, wide regulatory gaps exist through which pathogens can spillover and spread, leaving the public constantly vulnerable to zoonotic disease.

“COVID has infected more than 100 million Americans and killed over a million of them. But the next pandemic may be far worse and might happen sooner than we think. The stakes are simply too high for the problem to be ignored,” says Ann Linder, one of the report’s lead authors and a research fellow with the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School.

The immense and increasing scale of animal use in the United States makes the country uniquely vulnerable to zoonotic outbreaks. For example, the US is the largest importer of live wildlife in the world, importing more than 220 million wild animals a year, many without any health checks or disease testing.

The US also produces more livestock than almost any other nation. In 2022, the US processed more than 10 billion livestock, the largest number ever recorded. Yet, the USDA does not regulate on-farm production of livestock. At slaughterhouses inspections are cursory, with each inspector tasked with examining more than 600 animals per hour for signs of disease.

Read the full article about future pandemics by Peggy Mcglone at Futurity.