That’s the only way to avoid collapse of markets and pandemics.

Over the past 70 years, more than 300 new infectious pathogens have emerged in territory where they’ve never been seen before. In the last two years alone, two ghastly viruses—Zika and Ebola—have burst their geographic borders, surging into vulnerable new populations. And just this past April, a bacterial strain of E. coli impervious to last-resort antibiotics was discovered in a patient in Pennsylvania and in the tissues of a slaughtered pig, heralding a potential new era of untreatable infections that could transform modern medicine. Experts are bracing for a catastrophic pandemic—one that will sicken 1 billion, kill 165 million, and cost the global economy trillions of dollars. The conventional wisdom is that this rising threat is primarily a biomedical problem. But with newly emerged pathogens, some of our most important defenses are political.

To protect populations from epidemics for which no treatments exist, we need to address the underlying conditions that fuel their eruptions. In neglected communities like the Fifth Ward, that means the garbage crisis, poor drainage, and substandard housing, among other things. But for decades, we’ve refused to take the necessary action.

The failure originated in the 1970s rise of neoliberalism and the $300 billion pharmaceutical industry, and the resulting stranglehold that private interests have placed on the independence and integrity of our public-health institutions. That stranglehold has left us vulnerable to Zika, as well as to new kinds of drug-resistant superbugs, avian influenza, and other emerging pathogens.

Many of these pathogens are being driven into human populations through the global expansion of commercial activities. Mining, logging, agriculture, and urban development in the last refuges of biodiversity are introducing new pathogens into human populations. When wildlife and humans are forced into novel, intimate contact, the microbes that live in animals’ bodies jump over to ours. Ebola is one example, carried by fruit bats that once teemed in vast expanses of forests across sub-Saharan Africa, but which are now restricted to much smaller remnant forests, often in close proximity to human settlements. Avian-influenza viruses are another example, carried by migratory waterfowl that once flew over undeveloped tracts of Asia, but which now fly over and infect rapidly growing factory farms, making the strains much more virulent. Airlines and international-shipping companies, as well as the opportunities afforded by climate change, spread these pathogens to susceptible populations across the globe. And the kind of rapid economic growth that leads to crowded, unplanned urban centers provides ample fuel to spark epidemics.

Public-health regulations that target these conditions could deprive pathogens of the opportunity to erupt and spread. This approach would be far more effective than waiting for epidemics to develop and then scrambling to devise drugs and vaccines to tame them. But in many cases, it would require that the public-health sector confront corporate interests—and decades of corporate influence on public-health agencies have made that increasingly unlikely.