The best way to prevent a disease from turning into an epidemic is to closely monitor its development and put systems in place before it starts spreading rapidly through populations. This requires surveillance and monitoring of the disease and disease populations. This is fine for populations of livestock, or humans, but tends to be a neglected area when it comes to animals in the wild. There are plenty of examples of devastating diseases that have ranged through wild-animal populations relatively unchecked until the later stages as they were simply not caught early enough.

An example is the fungal skin infection of frogs (chytridiomycosis) which absolutely decimated amphibians, wiping out about 200 frog species world wide. Yet investigations into the disease didn’t start until 15 years after its initial appearance.