We Can’t Feed the World If We Ignore Animal Disease: Why Veterinary Pathogens Are a Global Health Crisis
According to the WHO, 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. And those risks are rising as deforestation and climate shifts push animals closer to humans.
By Jared bauer, Ceo of Seek Labs | July 23, 2025
The Hidden Threat to Our Food Supply
There’s a blind spot in global health.
We talk about pandemics. We talk about vaccines. We talk about supply chains. But somehow, we rarely talk about the part of the system that feeds the world.
Protein insecurity doesn’t always look like empty grocery shelves. Sometimes it looks like a virus spreading through pigs in the Philippines. Or trade bans in Europe. Or billions of dollars in livestock quietly culled to prevent the next outbreak. It all exposes a fragile global food system buckling under biological pressures.
African Swine Fever alone has caused more than $100 billion in losses globally over the past decade, halving China’s pig population at one point and triggering ripple effects across global pork markets. Avian influenza outbreaks have contributed to widespread egg shortages and the loss of tens of millions of birds.
This is not someone else’s problem. This is the soft underbelly of global health resilience and food security. And it’s time we treated it that way.
Zoonotic Risks: The Next Pandemic
Most pandemics don’t start in crowded cities. They start in animals.
Ebola. SARS. COVID-19. Zika. These weren’t random acts of nature. They were zoonotic events — mutations that crossed the species line and found a gap in the system. According to the WHO, 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. And those risks are rising as deforestation and climate shifts push animals closer to humans.
That gap is what we are closing.
At Seek Labs, we’ve spent the past few years building BioSeeker, an AI-driven discovery engine that maps conserved vulnerabilities across viral genomes. It was built to accelerate pandemic preparedness, guide CRISPR-based therapeutics, and enable rapid diagnostics. But it revealed a deeper truth: the viruses disrupting our food system — ASF, Capripox, CSFV — are genetically targetable but systematically overlooked.
By expanding BioSeeker to include zoonotic and veterinary pathogens, we are not just building animal models. We are building a surveillance and response engine that works across species. Because biology doesn’t care which host a virus starts in. If it moves, we need to move faster.
Conserved regions don’t lie. They are the quiet constants across species and strains, the pressure points where we can act decisively, before a virus jumps, not after.
Why We Expanded BioSeeker
This isn’t just about diagnostics or therapeutics. It’s about resilience in the face of brittle systems.
We didn’t do this to build a better animal test or to chase a niche market. We did it because the systems meant to protect our health — human and animal — don’t talk to each other.
We need a way to detect, respond, and design against disease across species, across borders, and in real time. That’s what BioSeeker is for. It gives us a window into how viruses evolve, and more importantly, where they don’t.
Veterinary inclusion is not an expansion. It is a step closer to completion. A necessary step in building a full-stack disease response engine. BioSeeker provides the intelligence layer. PTAP, our precision tool, targets viruses at their genetic core without harming the host. SeekIt, our portable diagnostic tool, detects diseases with lab-level accuracy on farms or in clinics.
Together, these layers give us the ability to move from insight to intervention with speed and precision.
One Health Is Not a Metaphor
It’s not a slogan or a checkbox. It’s a design constraint. If we want to build a healthier world, we need to acknowledge that human health and animal health are one ecosystem.
At Seek Labs, we’re not waiting for consensus. We’re building systems that adapt. Systems that learn, reprogram, and deploy across threat surfaces. That’s why veterinary pathogens are now part of our Global Disease Atlas. That’s why we’re designing precision tools for ASFV, Capripox, and CSFV. And that’s why we’re inviting others to join us.
Policymakers should prioritize funding for cross-species surveillance. Researchers can collaborate with us through the Global Disease Atlas. Investors, let’s scale these tools together.
What animal disease do you think poses the biggest threat to our food system? Share your thoughts and join the One Health conversation.
Because if we care about resilience, we can’t ignore the biology breaking our world.