Nathan Wolfe
About Nathan Wolfe
Speech topics
Vira Forecasting for Pandemic Prevention
Current global disease control efforts focus largely on attempting to stop pandemics after they have already emerged. This fire brigade approach, which generally involves drugs, vaccines, and behavioral change, has severe limitations. Just as we discovered in the 1960s that it is better to prevent heart attacks then try to treat them, over the next 50 years we will realize that it is better to stop pandemics before they spread and that effort should increasingly be focused on viral forecasting and pandemic prevention. In this talk I discuss how novel viruses enter into the human population from animals and go on to become pandemics. I then discuss attempts by my own research group to study this process and attempt to control viruses that have only recently emerged. By creating a global network at the interface of humans and animals we are working to move viral forecasting from a theoretical possibility to a reality.
Speaking videos
Media coverage
Nathan Wolfe, the virus tracker, comes to SVSU
You may not know the name, but Nathan Wolfe is a microbiologist whose work has spanned the globe. He was voted one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2011, and is the author of “Viral Storm”
NATHAN WOLFE: DID WE MENTION THIS GUY WAS BRILLIANT?
When it comes to viruses, especially the serious kind that can make you bleed from your eye sockets and wipe out entire villages, most people naturally prefer to keep their distance. Not Nathan Wolfe. The 39-year-old epidemiologist has spent the past 10 years hunting them down in the jungles of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr. Nathan Wolfe hunts viruses to prevent pandemic
AIDS, Ebola, avian flu, swine flu. All threatening diseases stemming from terrifying viruses that spread quickly and have infected hundreds of millions of people around the world. All started in animals, mutated, jumped to humans and became pandemics. All of them kill some of the people they infect and some of them kill a lot of the people they infect. But what if we knew they were coming? What if there were an early warning system that gave us a way to prevent the next big viral outbreak? There are scientists who believe prevention is possible and one of the most prominent, Dr. Nathan Wolfe, is leading the global virus hunt from a downtown office in San Francisco.
Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe tells of ‘the good, the bad, and the ugly’ of microbes
In today’s world, where deadly viruses like bird flu or SARS can spread from continent to continent in a matter of hours and there’s real danger of a pandemic, we should all be “a little worried all the time,” says Nathan Wolfe.
The 2011 TIME 100
Meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution. Welcome to this year's TIME 100.
Books by Nathan Wolfe
“The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age” (2011)
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