Fifteen years ago, scientists discovered a cave in southern China that held viruses almost identical to the one that has killed nearly 500 people today and the ones that caused the SARS and MERS outbreaks decades ago. 

The cave, whose exact location is being kept secret, is inhabited by wild bats that have been found to carry a  “rich gene pool of SARS-related coronaviruses,” said Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit organization that monitors wildlife diseases that could pose a pandemic risk.

Daszak said that one of the 500 or so virus strains discovered in 2004 is 96 per cent similar to the novel coronavirus that has infected 28,000 people and killed 560 since the outbreak began in December.  

“What we’re saying is that this cluster of viruses is a high risk,” Daszak said. 

The cave was discovered as part of the team’s efforts to track viruses similar to SARS in 2003, after the epidemic had struck, Daszak explained. At the time, people believed civets had caused the outbreak, but Daszak’s team disputed that notion.

Bats host a much higher number of zoonotic viruses than other mammals, many of which have caused human disease and outbreaks. A 2019 study warned that bats could cause the next coronavirus epidemic in China, due to their geographic proximity to several urban hotspots. This cave, for example, is located 60 kilometres from the city of Kunming in the Yunnan province of China. 

After the SARS epidemic, the team did not find many bats in the wildlife market, Daszak said, but noticed that people were “hunting them in the wild and selling directly to restaurants.” It collected faeces from bats that lived in the cave and tested them.

“We found viruses in bats that could infect human cells in a lab,” he said.  

The team then tested the viral strains on mice to see whether they would cause a SARS-like disease. They did.

Finally, the team drew samples from people who lived near the bat caves and found that three per cent of them had developed antibodies to the viruses — proving that the strains can and have infected humans in the past. 

“So that was a red flag,” Daszak said.

But a lack of funding prevented scientists from researching the virus now known to be a close relative of the 2019 novel coronavirus.

“It’s not that we didn’t find it interesting,” Daszak said. “It went back into the freezer because we didn’t have enough money.”

Instead, the researchers focused on the strains that most resembled SARS and flagged those as most high risk to authorities.

The team published its results in a number of accredited academic journals and Daszak argued for the viruses to be added to the WHO’s top pathogens of high risk to human health.

After flagging the viruses, the team went back to the same regions in China to interview people in rural communities and learn who was at highest risk in contact with wildlife. “We published that information, too, and now if you go to some of those caves, there’s a sign up that says don’t go in, no entry. That’s the sort of thing that the government does,” he explained. 

This cave, he said, has since been redeveloped but declined to elaborate.

“(WHO) took it seriously. The Chinese government took it seriously,” Daszak said. China has attempted to ban the trade and has even banned consumption of wildlife from government banquets, which is “a big thing,” he added.

However, it’s tough to block all the ways, such as the wildlife trade, that these viruses “spill over” into human populations. Behaviours like these, he explained are “culturally deep in our population habits.… These things go back 5,000 years of history, it’s not straightforward. You can’t just ban it and it goes away.”

Scientists studying the current coronavirus outbreak have not yet narrowed down how the disease spread to humans. If there was enough funding, however, Daszak believes that further research on the strain might have made a difference to preventing or minimizing the impact of the current outbreak. The funding could have supported efforts to sequence the virus genome, test it on animal models and then, depending on results, flag it as a “high risk factor” to respective authorities.

“You can’t say for sure” whether the current pandemic would have been prevented, he stressed. “We also don’t know for sure that blocking, you know, talking to communities and trying to get this reduced contact would actually stop an outbreak. But every little bit helps,” he said. 

There also isn’t enough large-scale support or funding to finance efforts to prevent pandemics from occurring in the future — a long-term, yet realistic endeavour, said Daszak. 

Last year, PREDICT, a U.S. federal program to identify wildlife viruses that could infect humans was shut down by the government due to “the ascension of risk-averse bureaucrats,” according to Dennis Carroll, the former director of the United States Agency of International Development (USAID). 

Over the past decade, the initiative had discovered more than 1,000 new viruses, including a new strain of Ebola. It also trained people and created medical infrastructure in several developing countries to prepare for potential outbreaks. 

USAID also funded the $200 million Global Virome Project (GVP), an international effort launched in 2016 to identify and catalogue 99 per cent of “all zoonotic viruses with epidemic/pandemic potential.”

GVP estimates that there are about 1.5 million viruses present in wildlife, some of which could pose a risk to human health. The organization needs between $1.2 billion and $3.4 billion to find them — a minimum of $125 million a year. 

It looks like a big number. Yet, CNN reported that the coronavirus outbreak could cost China $60 billion in lost economic growth. After SARS broke in 2003, an estimated $40 billion was lost in productivity.

“It’s hard to maybe fight for something that you don’t know about when there are other things that are killing people,” said Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Carolina, Davis who works with the GVP. “But examples like these just explain why we need to continue investing in both of these streams.”

While “it’s hard to say what will prevent an outbreak,” once authorities can understand where and when people are coming into contact with a potentially risky virus, and the kind of population behaviours that initiate contact, “you can think about how to prevent that or how to reduce contact,” she said.

Daszak also argued that there are economic benefits to initiatives that could prevent future pandemics. “We did an analysis on the return of investment of reducing the number of outbreaks,” he said. “For every dollar you spend on that, well, you get a $9 return on investment. It really does make economic sense as well as good public health.”

“We need a proper concerted effort,” he said, and there might be more of a willingness to “think more strategically” after this outbreak. 

“But the problem is between our breaks, in a year from now, the momentum may have gone — as it often does.”