Influenza is the pathogen most likely to cause a new pandemic in the near future, according to leading scientists.
An international survey, to be published next weekend, will reveal that 57% of senior disease experts now think that a flu virus is the cause of the next global outbreak of deadly infectious disease.
The belief that influenza is the world’s greatest pandemic threat is based on long-term research that shows it is constantly evolving and mutating, says Jon Salmanton-García of the University of Cologne, who conducted the study.
“Every winter flu shows up,” he said. “You can describe these outbreaks as small pandemics. They are more or less controlled because the different strains that cause them are not virulent enough – but this will not necessarily be the case forever.”
Details of the survey – which involved input from a total of 187 senior scientists – will be released at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) congress next weekend in Barcelona.
The next most likely cause of a pandemic, after influenza, is probably a virus – called Disease X – that is still unknown to science, according to 21% of the experts who participated in the study. They believe the next pandemic will be caused by a yet-to-be-identified microorganism that will appear out of the blue, just like the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the cause of COVID-19did, when it started infecting people in 2019.
Indeed, some scientists still believe that Sars-CoV-2 remains a threat, with 15% of the scientists surveyed in the study rating it their most likely cause of a pandemic in the near future.
Other deadly microorganisms – such as Lassa, Nipah, Ebola and Zika viruses – were rated as serious global threats by only 1% to 2% of respondents. “Influenza has remained – to a very large extent, the number one threat in terms of the pandemic potential in the eyes of a large majority of world scientists,” Salmanton-García added.
Last week the World Health Organization raised fears on the alarming spread of the H5N1 strain of influenza that is causing millions of cases of bird flu worldwide. This outbreak began in 2020 and has resulted in the death or killing of tens of millions of poultry and has also wiped out millions of wild birds.
Most recently, the virus has spread to mammalian species, including domestic cattle that are now infected in 12 states in the US, further raising fears about the risks to humans. The more mammal species the virus infects, the more opportunities it has to evolve into a strain dangerous to humans, Daniel Goldhill, of the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, told the journal. Earth last week.
The appearance of the H5N1 virus in cattle was a surprise, added Glasgow University virologist Ed Hutchinson. “Pigs can get bird flu, but cattle didn’t until recently. They are infected with their own strains of the disease. The appearance of H5N1 in cows was therefore a shock.
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“This means that the risks of the virus getting into more and more farm animals and then from farm animals into humans are only getting higher and higher. The more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to mutate so that it can spread to humans. Basically, we’re rolling the dice with this virus.”
To date, there has been no indication that H5N1 is spreading between people. But in hundreds of cases where people have been infected through contact with animals over the past 20 years, the impact has been severe. “The death rate is extraordinarily high because people have no natural immunity to the virus,” said Jeremy Farrar, the world’s chief scientist. Health Organization.
The prospect of a flu pandemic is worrisome, 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.
Nevertheless, some lessons about preventing the spread of disease have been forgotten since the end of the Covid pandemic, Salmanton-García said. “People went back to coughing into their hands and then shaking hands with other people. Mask wearing has disappeared. We go back to our old bad habits. We might regret it.”
