Stephen Morse is fighting off the flu.

Not literally. The professor of clinical epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health is perfectly healthy. But his research on the causes and effects of influenza is about to have global reach.

Last month, Morse was named director of a new program, formed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, to prevent the next global pandemic. Called PREDICT, it will act as an early warning system for emerging diseases, particularly those that move between animals and people.

In this role, Morse will work with a consortium of scientists and researchers at various organizations, including the School of Veterinary Medicine at University of California-Davis, which will be spearheading the consortium of partners. Other organizations involved include the Wildlife Conservation Society, Wildlife Trust, Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution.

“There are many possibilities out there for new infections, and we don’t have a system to watch for them and to respond quickly,” said Morse. “The objective of understanding emerging infection is in part to prevent the next HIV-AIDS [outbreak], which was a tremendous shock and tragedy to the entire health community."

Morse’s original expertise was in virology. He studied retroviruses, mad cow disease and herpes viruses, among others. Influenza captured his attention as he shifted his focus to the epidemiology of emerging viruses because it was so “intellectually challenging.”

He is passionate about the subject. His office in the Mailman school is wallpapered with books on infectious diseases—from the measles to the 1918 influenza pandemic—and his voice gets noticeably louder when he describes the end of smallpox in 1979. “The only infectious disease we’ve ever been successful at eradicating,” he boomed. “A triumphant moment!”

Before joining Columbia in 1995, Morse was program manager for biodefense at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense and a virology professor at The Rockefeller University. He founded ProMED, a nonprofit international program to monitor emerging diseases, and ProMED-mail, a network that uses the Internet to report outbreaks and monitor diseases.

Anticipating the next influenza pandemic is particularly tricky. “The flu is one of the more frustrating diseases to predict,” said Morse. “Like earthquakes, we know that [pandemics] are inevitable, but what’s frustrating is that we can’t predict exactly when this will happen and exactly where, which [flu] subtype it will be and how quickly it will spread into humans. And, often, the warning we get is very short.”

Such is the case with the H1N1 pandemic, which Morse says came out of the blue. “Everyone was looking at birds, at H5N1 [the avian flu],” he added. “We anticipated a new influenza, but we did not know it would be H1N1.”

This is not the first brush with swine flu. After an outbreak in 1976, 40 million people were vaccinated, but an epidemic never materialized, and some 500 fell ill after receiving the vaccine. “We’ve been humbled too many times by the unpredictability of these diseases, especially influenza,” said Morse, who notes that clean hands are one good way to prevent spreading infections. He keeps a bottle of Purell on his desk and refills in a file cabinet. For a while, he even wore a small bottle on a belt clip.

A major focus of PREDICT will be studying the origins and natural history of emerging infections, of which influenza is an example, in wildlife and the environment. There will be special attention on global hot spots, where there is close interaction between wildlife and humans, such as South America’s Amazon Basin, Africa’s Congo Basin and Southeast Asia.

“We ultimately want to be able to predict emerging infections. But, as with influenza, at this stage, the best we can do is watch carefully,” said Morse, “and develop better early warning systems so that we react as quickly as we can to control the infection.”