Nearly $574 million will be doled out to researchers across the country for projects aimed at ramping up Canada’s preparedness for future health emergencies, including the next pandemic, the federal government announced on Monday.

One of the 19 projects is a national network of existing emergency departments and primary-care clinics, called Prepared, that will screen for any new viruses or pathogens that start to appear in patients.

“As a public health specialist and as a practising physician, I would very much anticipate there being another respiratory pandemic in the future. The challenge is we don’t know when it will be or what it will be,” said Dr. Andrew Pinto, Prepared project lead and a family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“We should think of this like a protective shield that’s helping detect things early. Far earlier than during COVID,” Pinto said in an interview.

Researchers in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador have signed onto the project, he said, noting he hopes it will expand to include all provinces and territories.

The Prepared network, which received $18.9 million of the federal funding, will also bring in biotechnology companies that make rapid tests, drugs and therapeutics and vaccines, Pinto said, so they can quickly respond if there is early detection of a new virus or other pathogen of concern.

“(We want) to minimize the effect on people … by having detection early and, you know, containment early and really ramping up how quickly people have diagnostics and vaccines. All this can then reduce the impact on society as well,” he said.

Participating hospitals and primary-care clinics will ask patients who come in with respiratory symptoms for their permission to take swabs, which will be sent to labs to determine if they have a known illness — such as regular strains of influenza, COVID or RSV — or if they have an unknown, potentially new, viral or bacterial infection.

Swab samples will only be used for the project if patients give consent, Pinto emphasized.

Another piece of the Prepared project is using artificial intelligence to constantly scan electronic health data to identify patterns that could be an early signal of a new virus, he said.

Researchers from multiple countries will share findings to improve the odds of finding emerging pathogens in different parts of the world.