Her virus flu is the pathogen most likely to cause a new pandemic in the near future, leading scientists warn. According to an international survey, which will be published next weekend (April 27-28), the 57% of disease experts now believes that one strain of influenza virus will be the cause of the next pandemic.
The belief that influenza is the greatest global pandemic threat is based on long-standing research that shows that it is constantly evolving and mutatingsaid Yon Salmonton-Garcia of the University of Cologne, who conducted the study.
“The flu appears every winter. We could describe these outbreaks as mini-pandemics, which are more or less controlled because the various strains that cause them are not virulent enough – but that won’t necessarily be the case forever,” he said.
The details of the survey – in which they participated in total 187 senior scientists– will be revealed at the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) conference in Barcelona next weekend.
The next most likely cause of a pandemic, after the flu, is likely to be a virus – named Disease X (Disease X) – which is still unknown to science, according to 21% of the experts who participated in the study. They believe that the next pandemic will be caused by an as-yet-unidentified microorganism that will appear out of nowhere, just as the Sars-CoV-2 virus, its cause Covid-19. Indeed, some scientists still believe that Sars-CoV-2 remains a threat, with 15% of the researchers surveyed calling it the most likely cause of a pandemic in the near future. Other deadly micro-organisms – such as the Lassa, Nipah, Ebola and Zika viruses – were rated as serious global threats by only 1% to 2% of respondents.
“Influenza remained – by far – the number one threat in terms of pandemic potential according to the majority of global scientists,” added the researcher.
Global concern over bird flu
Last week, the World Health Organization expressed fears about the alarming spread of the H5N1 strain of influenza that has caused millions of cases around the world. The outbreak began in 2020 and has resulted in the death or culling of tens of millions of poultry and has wiped out millions of wild birds.
More recently, her virus bird flu spread to mammalian species including domestic cattle that have now been infected in 12 US states, further raising fears of risks to humans. The more species of mammals the virus infects, the more opportunities it has 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 emergence 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 were not infected. So the appearance of H5N1 in cows was a shock. It means that the risks of the virus passing to more and more farm animals and then to humans are getting bigger and bigger. “The more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to mutate so it can spread to humans,” he said.
To date, there is no evidence 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 effects have been grim.
“The mortality rate is extremely high because the people have no natural immunity to the virus”explained Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the World Health Organization.
The prospect of a flu pandemic is worrisome, although scientists point out that they already have developed vaccines against many strains, including H5N1.
“If an avian flu pandemic were to occur, producing vaccines at the scale and speed that would be required would be a huge logistical challenge. However, we would be much further down the road than we were with Covid-19, when we had to develop a vaccine from scratch,” Hutchinson said.
Still, some lessons about preventing the spread of the disease have been forgotten since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, Salmondón-Garcia said.
“People cough again by putting their hand over their mouth and then touching other people. The use of a mask has disappeared. We go back to our old bad habits. We may regret this,” concluded the researcher.
SOURCE: Guardian
