Czech biochemist Jan Konvalinka. (source: ESET Science Award/Linda Kisková Bohušová)
"I think humanity will be ready for the next pandemic. In the case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, not so much," says Czech biochemist Jan Konvalinka, head of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in Prague. He came to Bratislava last October for the ESET Science Award ceremony.
In this interview, he talks about the zoonotic origin of pandemics and why viruses are dangerous, why he expects the next pandemic to be caused by flu, and whether the world, and in particular Slovakia and the Czech Republic, will be ready.
A pandemic in the vein of the current Covid-19 was talked about long before it actually happened. Did you expect it?
My colleague and I wrote a book called Viruses for the 21st Century 11 years ago. We had a chapter on SARS, which we nicknamed the "pocket epidemic free trial". We said that one day a serious epidemic would indeed come. So yes, we expected it, although I confess that I assumed it would be the flu, which I still think will come. I also did not expect the current pandemic to be this big.
The assumption that it would come, what did you base it on?
All major viral epidemics have been of zoonotic origin, meaning they come from animals, including HIV, which comes from monkeys, but also Ebola and Marburg. Influenza epidemics originate from pigs and wild birds. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus most likely originated from bats, which are a huge storehouse of various viruses, especially coronaviruses. So the fact that a virus would emerge from bats and cause an epidemic was a fairly simple guess.
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What makes zoonoses, or animal-originated diseases, so dangerous?
Like all pathogens, viruses eventually find a way to cope with the immune response of the organism they live in and vice versa. They have no need to kill their host. On the contrary, it's like they say in mafia movies – it's nothing personal. But at first they are novel, they are not evolutionarily adapted to their host. This is precisely why epidemics caused by animal viruses are dangerous. They cause the most damage.
You mentioned that you think the next epidemic will be caused by flu. Why?
