Canada and Europe Build a Shared Shield Against Emerging Infections Across the North Atlantic

On most world maps, Canada and Europe appear as separate epidemiological worlds divided by the Atlantic Ocean. Viewed from the north, however, the picture changes dramatically. Greenland, Iceland and the wider Arctic form a continuous bridge between the two regions, crossed every year by migratory wildlife, linked within hours by air travel and increasingly traversed by ships. Across the Arctic, 1,812 vessels entered the Polar Code area in 2025, roughly 40 percent more than in 2013, and the total distance sailed nearly doubled as declining sea ice lengthens navigation seasons and opens northern routes. A new analysis argues that these overlapping ecological and human pathways, combined with rapidly deepening political ties, demand a deliberate strategy the authors call designed resilience: connecting existing surveillance, research and countermeasure networks before the next emergency, and testing each new connection for the vulnerabilities it creates.

The institutional groundwork is already extensive. The European Union and Canada have provisionally applied a Strategic Partnership Agreement and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement since 2017. A high-level bilateral health dialogue agreed at the 2021 Canada–EU Summit led to the first Health Policy Dialogue in 2024, covering health security, antimicrobial resistance and climate-related health risks. At the 2025 Summit, Health Emergency Readiness Canada and the European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority signed a five-year administrative arrangement on medical countermeasures, and in February 2026 the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the Public Health Agency of Canada adopted their first joint operational plan. Yet the authors caution that agreements alone do not create preparedness: none provides a predefined interface linking public health and ecological surveillance, clinical interpretation, research readiness and countermeasure response across the two regions.

The clearest demonstration of transatlantic ecological connectivity comes from avian influenza. In November and December 2021, highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) was detected in a wild gull and captive birds in Newfoundland and Labrador. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis showed the viruses were of Eurasian origin, most closely related to strains circulating in northwestern Europe, while migration data supported several plausible crossing routes through Iceland, Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic as well as direct pelagic crossings. Once in North America, the virus spread along migratory flyways and reassorted with local wild-bird influenza viruses, generating genotypic diversity; in 2024 it caused critical illness in an adolescent in British Columbia. Further transatlantic introductions of A(H5N5) were documented in Canada in 2023, followed by spillover into mammals, and the authors stress that future risk is not necessarily unidirectional, since viral evolution in North America now feeds into European risk assessments.

Surveillance capacity exists on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the European Food Safety Authority, ECDC and the European Union Reference Laboratory for Avian Influenza publish joint monitoring reports, while Canada’s National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg studies incursions carried by long-distance migratory birds. The Arctic is particularly important within this system, because climate-sensitive ecological change can alter wildlife movements, vector distributions and food-borne and water-borne exposures, while remote northern settings often have limited laboratory and public-health infrastructure. Arctic fox rabies, for example, has circulated across Canada, Greenland and Svalbard for decades. A recent assessment of surveillance for climate-sensitive infections in the Canadian Arctic and subarctic identified fragmentation across human, animal and environmental systems and called for greater international harmonisation and Indigenous leadership, noting that specimen referral pathways should be treated as part of surveillance performance rather than a separate laboratory issue.

The authors argue that no new surveillance architecture needs to be built from first principles. The International Circumpolar Surveillance system has shown that standardised infectious disease monitoring across Arctic jurisdictions is feasible, and the Arctic Council’s One Arctic, One Health initiative has supported knowledge exchange spanning human, animal and environmental health. Realistic objectives include compatible case definitions, agreed minimum metadata, interoperable genomic standards, rapid reciprocal notification and predefined triggers for joint risk assessment, rather than a single supranational database. The trichinellosis example illustrates the stakes: Trichinella nativa circulates in wildlife on both sides of the North Atlantic, but human diagnosis relies on serology that does not identify the species, and a French outbreak was linked to black bear meat illegally imported from Québec only because larvae happened to be genotyped. Any framework must also make surveillance blind spots explicit, since the absence of a signal is not the absence of risk.

Crucially, such systems must be built with, rather than around, northern communities. Meaningful participation by Indigenous peoples in priority setting, governance, data stewardship and benefit sharing is essential, not merely supplying surveillance data. The Inuit Circumpolar Council represents Inuit across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Chukotka, and the Saami Council provides a comparable structure across northern Europe. For First Nations, the OCAP principles of ownership, control, access and possession offer an established information-governance framework, applied in a distinctions-based manner. Trust is itself part of surveillance capacity: longstanding harms and limited local access to services can reduce participation unless programmes are locally governed, accessible and visibly beneficial.

Human mobility provides an even faster epidemiological bridge than wildlife. Genomic analysis of the first COVID-19 wave in Québec identified approximately 600 independent SARS-CoV-2 introductions, predominantly of European lineages, many arriving via the Americas around spring break, with a small number of early introductions seeding a substantial proportion of local transmission. The 2022 multinational mpox outbreak spread within weeks to countries on both sides of the Atlantic, and in an early international series about a quarter of patients had travelled abroad in the month before diagnosis. The same mobility patterns facilitate antimicrobial resistance: Canadian cases of extensively drug-resistant Shigella sonnei detected in 2021–22 were genetically linked to an outbreak strain first reported in the UK, and population-based surveillance in Ontario linked several carbapenemase-producing Enterobacterales to prior healthcare exposure abroad, including in southern Europe. Trade adds further pathways, from the mosquito Aedes albopictus, detected in Windsor, Ontario since 2016 alongside the first Canadian records of Aedes aegypti, to European-like haplotypes of Echinococcus multilocularis now established in Canadian wildlife and identified in human alveolar echinococcosis.

Signals detected separately on each side of the Atlantic are more informative when combined, and none of these examples shows a fixed direction of spread. The relationship between ECDC and PHAC, formalised in a 2007 memorandum of understanding and extended by the 2026 joint plan, offers a practical starting point for recurrent joint horizon scanning that integrates genomic epidemiology with animal health, vector and environmental signals. Because governance, privacy and legal obligations differ across jurisdictions, under the EU General Data Protection Regulation and Canadian federal and provincial privacy law, the authors argue these issues are easier to resolve before an outbreak occurs, by defining in advance what information must move, through which channels and with what minimum metadata. They propose a tiered escalation framework distinguishing signals requiring local verification, national assessment and coordinated international risk evaluation, with confidentiality safeguards to avoid stigmatising travellers, newcomers or diaspora communities.

Research and countermeasure capacity is the third pillar. The rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine, developed at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory, entered accelerated international evaluation during the 2014 West African epidemic, including phase 1 trials in Geneva and Hamburg, uniting Canadian discovery, European clinical research capacity and WHO coordination. REMAP-CAP, launched in Europe through the EU-funded PREPARE consortium and federated with Canadian networks, was already operating when COVID-19 emerged and pivoted rapidly to pandemic research, demonstrating why emergency-ready infrastructure must exist before a crisis. Canada’s association with Pillar II of Horizon Europe since 2024 allows Canadian researchers to join and lead consortia on nearly the same conditions as EU Member States, and the pan-European warm-base network Ecraid is contributing to an ever-warm clinical research platform under the BE READY NOW partnership launched in 2026. On countermeasures, the HERA–HERC arrangement could translate into mapping complementary manufacturing capabilities, identifying dependencies on critical raw materials, establishing regulator-to-regulator pathways between Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency, and exercising surge production before an emergency.

Integration, the authors warn, should not be confused with resilience. Four vulnerabilities deserve attention: correlated supply-chain risk, evident when the EU had exported around 16 million vaccine doses to Canada by June 2021, about 60 percent of all doses Canada had received; data and digital dependence, which increases exposure to cybersecurity events and incompatible legal requirements; institutional duplication, since new arrangements that reproduce existing functions add complexity rather than capability; and global fragmentation, if cooperation merely secures preferential access for two high-income regions and reproduces the inequities of COVID-19. The proposed test for every mechanism is whether it strengthens broader surveillance, supports equitable access, preserves redundancy and remains consistent with the amended International Health Regulations and the WHO Pandemic Agreement. Professional networks, including ESCMID collaboration with AMMI Canada and CACMID, joint modelling exercises between Canadian and European hubs, and clinician-driven alert pathways, can test these connections between crises. Success, the authors conclude, should be measured not by the number of new agreements, but by whether existing networks function together when confronted by the next emerging threat.

Subject of Research: Transatlantic preparedness for emerging infections linking Canada and Europe through Arctic ecology, human mobility and health cooperation

Article Title: Closer Canada–Europe relations and emerging infections: designing resilience across the North Atlantic

Article References: Gupta, N., Pellejero-Sagastizabal, G., Jokelainen, P., Hanscheid, T., Drexler, J. F., Barac, A., Dempsey, N. T., de Jong, H. K., Bulescu, C., Kariyawasam, R. M., Tarrabain, J., Fisman, D. N., Igboanugo, A., Frenette, N., Goorhuis, A., Safronetz, D., Paño-Pardo, J. R., Lescure, X., Mora-Rillo, M., … Grobusch, M. P. (2026). Closer Canada–Europe relations and emerging infections: designing resilience across the North Atlantic. New Microbes and New Infections, Article 101874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nmni.2026.101874

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.nmni.2026.101874

Keywords: emerging infections, Canada, Europe, Arctic, avian influenza, One Health, pandemic preparedness, medical countermeasures, surveillance, antimicrobial resistance, ECDC, Horizon Europe