Hyderabad: A few weeks earlier, the WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had announced that the Covid-19 Pandemic is no longer a global health emergency, but in a recent statement he asked the member nations at the 75th World Health Assembly to be prepared for a pandemic "even deadlier" than the Covid-19.
Post this statement made by Ghebreyesus, scientists all around the world have found a renewed interest in the list of 'priority diseases' that might cause the next outbreak, which was first made available on the WHO's website in 2018. This short list consists of the names of the diseases that could cause the next pandemic, which might be deadlier than Covid-19.
While most of the diseases mentioned in the list are known to people, such as Zika, Ebola, and SARS, the final entry in the list titled "Disease X" has caused concerns among scientists all over the globe. According to the WHO, the term 'Disease X' "represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease".
Also read: "End of COVID as global health emergency is not the end of COVID as global health threat": WHO chief
This pathogen could be anything, from a virus, a fungus, or a bacterium without any treatments known to man. This term was initially used by the WHO in the year 2018, and a year later, the spread of Covid-19 began across the globe. "It is not an exaggeration to say that there is potential of a Disease X event just around the corner," Pranab Chatterjee, a researcher at the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said to a media house.
"The recent spate of H5N1 bird flu cases in Cambodia is just a case in point," Chatterjee added. The term has given rise to deliberation all across the world, with many researchers claiming the next pandemic will be zoonotic, like Covid-19 and Ebola, caused by Disease X. While some also stated that the pathogen could also be generated by humans.
Researchers stated that "The possibility of an engineered pandemic pathogen also cannot be ignored," in a 2021 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. The WHO list also includes diseases such as Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Lassa fever, Marburg virus, Nipah and henipaviral diseases, Middle East respiratory syndrome and Rift Valley fever as priority diseases. According to the WHO chief's statement, health experts want surveillance to be increased for now.
