A new review published in Frontiers, titled "From spillover to systems: evidence gaps in One Health preparedness for emerging infectious diseases in Latin America and the Caribbean," argues that the region's readiness for the next spillover event rests less on pathogen discovery than on the strength of the surveillance and response systems around it.

The title itself signals the argument's arc. The authors move from "spillover" — the viral leap from animal reservoir to human host that dominates outbreak headlines — to "systems," the veterinary, public health and environmental infrastructure that determines whether a spillover becomes a cluster, and a cluster becomes an epidemic.

Why does this matter at the exam table and in the barn?

For veterinarians in the region, the review's framing places clinical practice inside the surveillance chain rather than beside it. Latin America and the Caribbean sit at high risk of emerging infectious diseases, driven by biodiversity, land-use change and dense human-animal interfaces. That ecology reaches practice directly: livestock operations bordering forest fragments, companion animals in urban households, and wildlife contact along agricultural frontiers all form the routes by which pathogens cross species.

The "One Health" lens the authors apply is not new, but the review's contribution is its inventory of what remains unknown. The evidence gaps they catalog cover where spillover risk is highest and where preparedness systems — surveillance networks, laboratory capacity, cross-sector coordination — fail to collect or share the data that would let clinicians and officials act early.

What does a "systems" framing change?

Preparedness literature often measures a pathogen list: which viruses circulate, which hosts carry them. A systems approach measures the connections instead.

That shift carries practice-level consequences the authors make explicit:

• Surveillance must connect veterinary observation to human health reporting, or early animal signals go unrecorded.
• Laboratory capacity must span species, so a febrile patient and a sick herd can be tested against the same differential.
• Coordination among agricultural, health and environmental agencies determines how fast a signal becomes a response.

Which gaps does the review identify?

The paper's core finding is structural. Preparedness in Latin America and the Caribbean suffers not from an absence of spillover science but from uneven evidence about how preparedness systems perform — where they detect, where they miss, and where the animal-health side of the chain is weakest. The authors treat those gaps as tractable: nameable, measurable, and therefore fundable.

For food-animal veterinarians, the implication reads as a data problem before it reads as a biological one. Herd-level monitoring, slaughter surveillance and diagnostic submission patterns all feed the systems the review evaluates. Where those inputs thin out, the region's early-warning capability thins with them.

For companion-animal practice, the review's relevance runs through zoonotic interfaces in cities, where domestic animals contact wildlife and humans in close quarters. And for public health, the region's history with emerging infections — and its role as a corridor for pathogen movement — makes the animal-health evidence base a continental concern, not a local one.

What comes next?

The authors position the review as a map for future work: a documented set of evidence gaps that researchers, funders and health authorities can prioritize. Whether that map translates into surveillance investment will decide how much of the region's spillover risk is caught at the animal interface — and how much reaches human populations first.