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Disease X, scientists warn: The next pandemic will be caused by the virus of...

2024-04-20 17:11:31Aktualitet SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Disease X, scientists warn: The next pandemic will be caused by the virus of...
An artist working on a mural during the coronavirus pandemic in Manchester, England. Some scientists believe that Sars-Cov-2 still remains a threat.

The flu is once again a threat. Scientists are raising the alarm over what they so far call Disease X, The Guardian reports .

According to the world's most vocal scientists, influenza is the pathogen most likely to cause a new pandemic in the near future.

An international survey, to be published next weekend, will reveal that 57% of top disease experts now think that a type of flu virus will be the cause of the next global outbreak of the deadly infectious disease.

The belief that influenza is the world's greatest pandemic threat is based on long-term studies that show it is constantly evolving and changing, said Jon Salmanton-García of the University of Cologne, who conducted the study.

"Every winter flu shows up," he says. “You could describe these outbreaks as mini-pandemics. They are more or less controlled because the different strains that cause them are not virulent enough – but that won't necessarily be the case forever."

Details of the survey – which included input from a total of 187 scientists – will be revealed at the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) congress in Barcelona next weekend.

The next most likely cause of a pandemic, after the flu, is likely to be a virus – called Disease X – that is still unknown to science, according to 21% of experts who took part in the study. They believe the next pandemic will be caused by an as-yet-unidentified microorganism that will emerge out of sight, just as the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the cause of Covid-19, did when it began infecting humans in 2019.

Indeed, some scientists still believe Sars-CoV-2 remains a threat, with 15% of scientists polled in the study rating it their most likely cause of a pandemic in the near future.

Other deadly microorganisms – such as the Lassa, Nipah, Ebola and Zika viruses – were rated as serious global threats by only 1% to 2% of respondents.

"Influenza remained - on a very large scale - the number one threat in terms of its pandemic potential in the eyes of the vast majority of world scientists," Salmanton-García added.

Last week, the World Health Organization raised fears about the alarming spread of the H5N1 strain of influenza that is causing millions of cases of bird flu across the globe. This outbreak began in 2020 and has led to the death or killing of tens of millions of birds and has also wiped out millions of wild birds.

Recently, the virus has spread to mammalian species, including domestic animals that are now infected in 12 states in the US, further raising fears of risks to humans. The more species of mammals the virus infects, the more likely it is to evolve into a strain that is dangerous to humans, Daniel Goldhill, of the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, told the journal Nature last week.

The appearance of the H5N1 virus in cattle was a surprise, added virologist Ed Hutchinson, from the University of Glasgow. "Pigs can get bird flu, but until recently cattle didn't. They were infected with their own types of disease. So the appearance of H5N1 in cows was a shock."

"This means that the risks of the virus being introduced into more and more farm animals, and then from farm animals to humans, only increases. The more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to mutate so that it can spread to humans. Basically, we are rolling the dice with this virus."

To date, there has been no indication that H5N1 is spreading among humans. But in the hundreds of cases where humans have been infected through contact with animals over the past 20 years, the impact has been grim. "The mortality rate is extremely high because people have no natural immunity to the virus," said Jeremy Farrar, the World Health Organization's chief scientist.

The prospect of a flu pandemic is alarming, although scientists also point out that vaccines against many strains, including H5N1, have already been developed. "If there was an avian flu pandemic, it would still be a massive logistical challenge to produce vaccines at the scale and speed that would be needed. However, we would be much further down that road than we were with Covid-19 when a vaccine had to be developed from scratch," Hutchinson said.

However, some lessons in preventing the spread of disease have been forgotten since the end of the Covid pandemic, Salmanton-García said. "People have gone back to coughing into their hands and then shaking hands with other people. The wearing of masks is gone. We are going back to our old bad habits. We may be sorry for that."


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