“[The]cruel irony here [is] that the world cannot get its act together to address these threats … people are dying, animals are suffering, we’re losing rainforest … these are all interconnected threats,” Neil Vora tells me on this week’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, just a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 80 suspected deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo from an outbreak of the Ebola virus. Vora is a former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemic intelligence service officer who deployed to the DRC to combat Ebola. He says the current strain, the Bundibugyo virus, is particularly dangerous because there is no current approved treatment or vaccine for it. While neither this virus nor the Andes virus, a type of hantavirus that originated in Chile and Argentina and killed three people on a cruise ship, is likely to cause a pandemic, says Vora, he stresses member states of the WHO are unprepared to address a pandemic should one occur. According to Vora, the WHO could have achieved a pandemic agreement to better address the threats pandemics pose. But that fell short when nations failed to adopt a system to equitably share tools such as vaccines. “ And now those discussions on the pandemic agreement have stalled, and days later, we have these two outbreaks of zoonotic viruses.” Vora stresses that measures can be taken now to help stop the risk of pandemics, such as by banning fur farms in the European Union;…This article was originally published on Mongabay