Sputnik News – January 28, 2021
The development comes a day after Bill Gates said that the world is not ready for the next pandemic. The Microsoft co-founder, who is at the forefront of the campaign to eradicate COVID-19, said the next outbreak could be ten times worse than the current one and called on the international community to prepare for future challenges.
A leading British scientist has warned that a pandemic of “Disease X” is around the corner, noting that it is not a matter of if, but when the world will face another daunting challenge. Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the Usher Institute at the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh, said he and his colleagues in 2017 approached the World Health Organisation, asking the agency to place something called Disease X on its list of priorities.
“We thought that the next emerging pandemic might be a virus that we don’t even know about yet – quite frankly we thought it was the most likely scenario”, Woolhouse said.
At a meeting with WHO officials a year later, Woolhouse and his colleagues thought about what Disease X could wind up being. One of their hypotheses suggested that it would be a novel coronavirus related to MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) or SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome).
Asked whether the next Disease X could potentially be around the corner, the scientist responded “absolutely”. Woolhouse noted, however, that the mechanism by which the disease will break out is always unpredictable.