The next deadly pandemic could make this look like "a warmup."
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| | As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, killing thousands and crushing the global economy, the potential threat of zoonotic spillover — when novel viruses and bacteria jump from animals to people — is becoming increasingly clear. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 almost certainly originated in bats and is believed to have spilled into humans at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. Readily transmissible and far deadlier than the seasonal flu, COVID-19 is now one of the worst pandemics of animal origin that humans have faced in a century. But it won’t be the last.
There are millions of viruses and bacteria out there that reside in wild animals and can potentially infect humans, and these emerging diseases are on the rise everywhere as humans disrupt ecosystems and exploit animal habitat across the globe. We are living in an age of pandemics, and the next one — let’s call it “Disease X,” as scientists often do — could be even more devastating than COVID-19.
“On a scale of 1 to 100, we could place [the current outbreak] probably somewhere a little below midway,” said Dennis Carroll, the chair of the Global Virome Project and former director of the emerging threats division at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). |
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