How do we halt the next pandemic? Be kind to critters like bats, says a new paper

When Australia's black flying foxes are well-fed, they tend to be healthy. A lack of food stresses the bats — and stress causes them to shed, or release, viruses into the environment. (Ko Konno/Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Almost every pandemic we've seen over the last century has come from a virus that's spilled over into humans from an animal. "Generally, pandemics are seen as a biomedical problem," says Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist at Cornell University. "Certainly, once the pandemic is underway, it is a biomedical problem because you need to have vaccines, you need therapeutics, you need testing," she says.

"But the genesis of the pandemic is actually an ecological problem," says Plowright. That is, it's due to the complex interactions between wildlife, habitat, climate and people.