This won’t be the last pandemic. Where will the next one come from?

By | June 18, 2020

Several types of viruses could pose a global threat, not just the coronavirus that causes covid-19

Health 17 June 2020

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There are estimated to be up to 800,000 viruses in animals that have the potential to infect humans. But identifying them is a task of Sisyphean proportions. One of the main programmes that seeks to detect novel viruses, PREDICT, run by the US Agency for International Development, spent 10 years and more than $ 200 million searching in 30 countries and managed to uncover just 931 novel viruses in wild animals, livestock and humans. Some of these are deemed potential threats to humans, including novel strains of Ebola and variants of the SARS and MERS coronaviruses. However, the project didn’t detect the covid-19 virus before it spilled over into humans. Funding for PREDICT has been extended to September to support response to the current outbreak, but its primary mission ended in March.

Still, we do have some idea of what kinds of viruses to look out for. For a 2018 report published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Maryland, Amesh Adalja interviewed more than 120 global experts in infectious disease. They agreed that a global pandemic would most likely be caused by a novel virus strain that crossed over from animals (see “We knew how to prevent a pandemic like covid-19, so what went wrong?”), meaning we had no immunity to it. They also thought it would spread between humans via coughing and sneezing, and that it could be transmitted by asymptomatic people or before the onset of symptoms. Sound familiar?

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The experts concluded that highly deadly viruses like Ebola are unlikely to cause a pandemic because they tend to kill hosts before they …

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