In the new movie "Contagion," a character named Beth, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, falls ill after returning from a trip to Asia. Her flulike symptoms quickly give way to much worse: She becomes disoriented, foams at the mouth, and has a seizure on the kitchen floor. Within days, she is dead.

"Contagion" is fiction, but just barely. The bug that kills Gwyneth Paltrow's character is made up, but the risk it represents is entirely plausible. The film's screenwriter did some of his research at Global Viral Forecasting, the monitoring group that I founded, and talked through his initial plot ideas at a seminar that I teach at Stanford.

A hunter shows a card with blood samples from an animal caught in the jungle in Cameroon. Scientists analyze such cards to monitor the presence of microbes. Reportage/Getty Images

Since pandemics were first recognized as a serious public-health problem a century ago, the usual approach has been reactive: throw everything you've got at the disease du jour. When there is an influenza threat, drop everything and focus on risks from influenza pandemics. When SARS spreads, focus on unknown respiratory diseases.

This approach helps to quell public concern, but it's a hugely inefficient way to deal with future risks, especially at a time when lethal microbes are frequent fliers. It does nothing to deal with the next unknown viral agent, of the sort dramatized in "Contagion."

We need a different approach, based on our growing capacity to predict the most serious threats and to keep them from spreading. Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

My own thinking on these issues dates back to the late 1990s, when I started working with the distinguished virologist Donald Burke at Johns Hopkins University and agreed to establish a field site in central Africa aimed at monitoring humans and animals for new viruses.

Taking a cue from the national-security agencies that scan emails, phone calls and online discussions in order to see patterns in "intelligence chatter," Don coined the term "viral chatter" to suggest the possibility of detecting signals created by new and emerging viruses well before they reach the wider human population. But how could we detect the chatter events—the jumping of novel viruses to humans—that would signal a looming plague?

One of the keys to such surveillance, we found, was to focus on perhaps the most direct interface between humans and wild animals: "bushmeat." Bushmeat is another word for wild game, and it is crucial to the local diet in many parts of central Africa. Where domestic protein sources are scarce, animals ranging from guinea fowl and pythons to monkeys and porcupines often take their place. Collectively, these wild animals harbor an enormous universe of microbes, which can provide fodder for pandemics.

Animals like the mandrill, eaten as bushmeat, harbor diseases that can jump to humans. Image Bank/Getty Images

Our early research was in Cameroon, where our overriding objective was to understand why HIV in central Africa was so diverse compared with the fatal but genetically bland and homogenous versions of the virus that hit most of the world. Basically, we wanted a snapshot of what HIV looked like before it went global.

We started by setting up shop in rural villages throughout the country. From the people who enrolled in our studies, we collected blood samples using high-tech tubes that allowed us to easily separate the different parts of the blood when we got it back to the laboratory. We also collected thousands of blood specimens from animals, using baseball-card-size sampling papers that we passed out to hunters. These specimens allowed us to determine what microbes were present.

In Cameroon, we established relationships with 17 rural villages in remote, biologically diverse parts of the country. Twelve of them had unique forms of HIV viruses that were patched together from different sorts of HIV variants, ones that had never been seen together before.

We also looked into the ways that the people of these villages interacted with wildlife. In a study coordinated by Adria Tassy Prosser, an anthropologist and epidemiologist now based at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, we learned that the villagers had an incredibly intimate level of contact with wild animals. The process of butchering gave them direct exposure to virtually all of the blood and body fluids that viruses call home. As we expected, people engaged in hunting and butchering were at the front line of viral transmission from animals to humans.

Over the past 10 years, my team has worked with a range of local collaborators throughout the world to replicate the model developed in Cameroon. We have deployed it in a half-dozen countries in central Africa and also have established programs in China and Southeast Asia, another part of the world where wilderness, poverty and rapid development conspire to bring humans into intimate and potentially dangerous contact with wild animals.

We are also working with universities, international health organizations and governments to bring detailed data from the field and lab together with real-time data from cellphones, social media and other sources. The idea is to create a system that can anticipate viral threats and head them off before they spread.

Workers in India dispose of contaminated chickens. Getty Images

Our progress so far is encouraging. We regularly detect new microbes, which allows us to identify and follow people who have been infected and might launch new epidemics.

But our efforts are still piecemeal in relation to the scope of the threat. Organizations like Google have built tools for gathering and sorting information that we could barely have dreamt of a few decades ago. We need similar innovations in global health. If Google, as some have said, has helped to create a global nervous system, our aim is to build a global immune system.

What might it look like?

I imagine a 24-hour-a-day global situation room for emerging diseases. Kids just out of college, wearing hoodies and sneakers, would sit hunched over laptops, talking on the phone and instant messaging while mashing together and analyzing massive amounts of disparate data. Large monitors with maps and streaming news would line the walls.

On a given day, the top of the agenda for the analysts might be, say, Nigeria, Dubai and Suriname. Clear signals from the data have elevated the risk profile of these countries to "regular alert," which means that roughly 20% of the team's effort is focused on discussing the situation with on-the-ground team members and local and international health leaders.

One analyst is following "chief medical complaints" filtered and forwarded from a cellphone-based electronic-medical-record system in Lagos. Over the past 30 hours, the frequency with which patients are reporting severe fever has increased steadily from the established baseline, and it matches independent over-the-counter drug purchase data for medications treating fever and malaise. The Twitter and Google trends on terms related to acute viral illness are also spiking.

Within hours the group on the ground in Nigeria will have the potential to upload reams of new genetic data from specimens that are just now being examined. Computer algorithms and bioinformatics engineers will search for the needle in the haystack—the new virus that appears to be killing people in western Africa.

Though some of these tools are beginning to come together in organizations like my own, this scenario is still largely wishful thinking. There is no such control room—yet. The reams of data from electronic medical records do not yet exist, and the data from pharmacies are not yet well coordinated and compiled.

But such a system is exactly what we need—an innovative group devoted entirely to understanding and analyzing biological threats and catching them before they become disasters.


—Dr. Wolfe is the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University and the founder and chairman of Global Viral Forecasting, a research institute devoted to the early detection and control of epidemics. This essay is adapted from his new book, "The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age."