Scientists believe that the next pandemic will be caused by some variant of a well-known virus: Influenza, which causes the flu. The warning comes amid the spread of strains of avian influenza, which only circulated in birds, but which have spread among mammals such as cattle in the United States. In the sporadic cases reported in humans, they usually have a high lethality rate, above 50%.
The expectation that a version of Influenza is the pathogen most likely to cause a new health crisis is part of research conducted with scientists from the VACCELERATE Consortium, which brought together experts from different countries to accelerate clinical studies of doses against Covid-19. It was published in the scientific journal Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease and will be presented next week during the Global Congress of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID), in Barcelona, Spain.
A total of 187 responses were collected from experts in 57 countries. The researchers, with extensive experience in infectious diseases, were asked to classify different agents according to their pandemic potential. The flu virus was the first in the ranking for 57% of experts, and another 17% placed it in second place.
“Every winter we have an Influenza season. You could say this means that every winter there are small pandemics. They are more or less controlled because the different strains are not virulent enough. However, with each season, the strains involved change, which is why we can get the flu several times in our lives, and the vaccines change year to year. If a new strain becomes more virulent, this control could be lost,” says the study’s lead author, Salmanton-García, from the University of Cologne, Germany, in a statement.
Disease X
Other pathogens that were highlighted include Disease X, the name used for a microorganism that has not yet been discovered, identified by 21% of scientists as having the greatest pandemic potential. A version of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, came in third place, with 8% of researchers believing that it still has the greatest potential to cause a new pandemic.
Also mentioned were the original SARS-CoV, which circulated in 2002 and 2003; the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHF virus) and Ebola. Nipah, henipavirus and Rift Valley fever virus were among the lowest-ranked pathogens in terms of pandemic potential.
“The research findings indicated that influenza, disease X, SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and the Ebola virus are the pathogens that pose the greatest threat in terms of their potential to cause a pandemic. Respiratory droplets facilitate the transmission of these pathogens, which have a track record of causing epidemic or pandemic outbreaks in the past.,” the scientists recalled in the study.
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