Scientists have warned that a brain inflammation disease 75 times more deadly than coronavirus could mutate to become the next pandemic that will kill millions.
Experts told Sun Online how several emerging diseases could trigger another global outbreak, and this time it could be “the big one”.
The fear is that the bat fruit virus, Nipah, is the main candidate for seriously concerned.
Severe brain inflammation, seizures and vomiting are just some of the symptoms of this very powerful disease, which was first discovered in 1999 in Malaysia.
Outbreaks in South and Southeast Asia show that the virus is extremely deadly, with a mortality rate of between 40 and 75%.
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According to Imperial College, the COVID-19 mortality rate is around 1%, so a Nipah pandemic would kill many more people.
It has also been designated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the 16 priority pathogens for research and development because of its potential to trigger an epidemic.
And, horribly, Nipah is just one of 260 known viruses with epidemic potential.
The virus is so worrying about its long incubation period of up to 45 days, meaning people could spread it for more than a month before falling ill and its ability to cross between species.
Nipah also has an exceptionally high mutation rate and fears that a strain better adapted to human infections could spread rapidly through the well-interconnected countries of Southeast Asia.
And while COVID-19 has devastated the world, killing nearly 2.5 million people, it has already been warned that the next pandemic could be much worse.
Dr. Melanie Saville, director of vaccine research and development at CEPI, has warned that the world must be prepared for the next “big one.”
Humans collide with nature as populations expand and habitats recede as the main driver of new diseases, and this is exactly what happened to Nipah when it first infected ranchers. of pork in Malaysia.
Dr. Rebecca Dutch, president of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the University of Kentucky and a world leader in the study of viruses, said that while there are no current outbreaks of Nipah in the world, they occur periodically. and it is “extremely likely” that we will see more.
“Nipah is one of the viruses that could be the cause of a new pandemic. Several things about Nipah are very worrying, “Dr. Dutch said.
“Many other viruses in this family (such as measles) transmit well among people, so there is concern that a Nipah variant with increased transmission may arise.
“The mortality rate of this virus ranges from 45% to 75% depending on the outbreak, so it is much higher than COVID-19. It has been shown that Nipah transmits through food as well as through contact with human or animal excretions.
“The Nipah incubation period can be quite long and it can’t be clear if it can be transmitted during that time.”
In addition to fruit bats, pigs have contracted the disease by eating infected mangoes and are known to transmit the disease to humans.
More than a million pigs believed to be infected with the Nipah virus were slaughtered in Malaysia to prevent it from being transmitted to humans.
Dr. Jonathan Epstein, vice president of science and outreach at the EcoHealth Alliance, explained how they are tracking the Nipah virus and are concerned about its potential.
“We know very little about the genetic variety of Nipah-related viruses in bats, and what we don’t want to happen is for a more transmissible strain to appear between people,” Dr. Epstein.
“So far, Nipah stretches between close contact with an infected person, especially with someone with respiratory disease through drops, and we generally don’t see large chains of transmission.
“However, having enough opportunity to spread from bats to people, and among people, a strain more adapted to the diffusion between people could arise.
“It’s a zoonotic virus knocking on your door and we need to really work now to understand where human cases occur and try to reduce the chances of an overflow, so you never have a chance to adapt to humans “.
THE BIGGEST’
And Dr. Saville warned that we must be prepared for the next “big one, no matter where it comes from.
“The most crucial thing is that we shouldn’t just look at Nipah,” he said.
“We know that a future pandemic is inevitable and that there are many other emerging infectious diseases that are recognized as having the potential for a pandemic.
“This includes known disease threats, such as influenza, as well as new or still identified pathogens, known as ‘X disease.’
“With environmental changes such as climate change, habitat destruction and human invasion of previously isolated areas, human interactions have created a fertile space for viruses to jump between species and therefore we must be prepared for to the next “big.”
Dr. Saville added that CEPI is studying the possibility of producing a library of vaccine prototypes that can target all coronaviruses at once.
He added that they would build on what they had learned from COVID-19 to try to eliminate the risk of a future pandemic.
The executive director of the Access to Medicine Foundation, Jayasree K Iyer, also called superbugs a major pandemic risk.
She said: “Antibiotic resistance already causes more than 700,000 deaths each year, including more than 200,000 infant deaths.
“Antibiotics are used for the treatment of almost all cases of severe COVID-19, causing an increasing number of bacteria to be resistant to these antibiotics.”
Iyer and experts are concerned that pharmaceutical companies will not do enough to create vaccines in time for the next pandemic.
For example, there are no specific drugs or vaccines for the Nipah virus.
But the next pandemic could come from a pathogen we currently don’t know about.
The unknown outbreak, known as Disease X, could cause a worse outbreak than Black Death if more is not done to control zoonotic diseases.
Of the 1.67 million unknown viruses on the planet, up to 827,000 of these could have the ability to infect people from animals, according to the EcoHealth Alliance.
A study published in Nature Communications identified Southeast Asia, South and Central Africa, areas around the Amazon and eastern Australia as the areas most at risk for new diseases.
Environmental writer John Vidal, who is working on a book that reveals the links between nature and disease, predicted that the world is facing a new Black Death-scale pandemic.
Given the popularity of air travel and world trade, a virus could sink worldwide, unknowingly, spread by asymptomatic carriers, “in a matter of weeks, killing tens of millions of people before borders could be closed. “, add.
He said: “Humanity has changed its relationship with wild and farm animals, destroying their habitats and gathering them, and the process … is just accelerating.
“If we don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation, this current pandemic may just be a precursor to something that is even more serious.”
THE PANDEMIC PAINTING OF THE WORLD
These are the deadliest disease outbreaks in history, with many times the number of deaths Covid currently triggered.
• Black Death – Between 75 and 200 million people lost their lives, up to 60% of the entire European population, when the plague struck the continent from 1346 to 1353.
It was probably transmitted to humans through fleas that fed on black rats on commercial vessels in the Mediterranean before spreading across Europe and North Africa.
• Spanish flu – While the world was trying to recover from the horror of the Great War in 1918, a disaster arose that caused twice as many people as the conflict with the Spanish flu.
Between 17 and 100 million people died during the pandemic that lasted until 1920, but there is currently no consensus on the origin of the virus, although it appears to have nothing avian.
• Justinian’s plague – It is believed to be the same bacterium responsible for the Black Death, the plague ravaged Europe and Western Asia and killed between 15 and 100 million people in 541 and 542 AD.
It is also believed to have spread to fleas carrying rats and spread to the Byzantine Empire via grain ships arriving from Egypt.
• HIV / AIDS pandemic – Still ravaging parts of the world, an estimated 35 million people have died from the insidious virus since 1981.
It is believed to have jumped from primates to humans and first spread through the scrub meat trade.
• The third plague – The bubonic plague struck China again in 1855 from where it spread and killed up to 15 million people.
The WHO estimated that the bacteria were rampant until 1960, with only the end of the pandemic, and continue to closely monitor outbreaks of the plague.
DISEASES ON THE LIST OF DANGERS OF WHOM
The World Health Organization (WHO) has an elevation of priority pathogens for research due to the threat posed by a widespread epidemic, these being the most important problems:
•Ebola – Six African countries have been put on alert by the WHO after Guinea declared it was suffering from another Ebola epidemic. The disease has killed more than 11,000 people in the region. It leads to fever, headaches, muscle aches and bleeding from the ears, eyes, nose or mouth.
• SARS – The virus is believed to have first emerged from bats in China, such as COVID-19, which caused an epidemic between 2002 and 2004 that killed 774 people. SARS is an airborne virus and can spread through small drops of saliva in a manner similar to COVID-19 and influenza.
• MERS – A mistake that is believed to have spread from bats to camels to humans in the Middle East. It is not as infectious as SARS or COVID, but has a mortality rate of around 35%.
• Rift Valley fever – A zoonotic disease that is transmitted mainly to humans through infected animal blood and mosquitoes. The most extreme forms of the virus can cause blindness, jaundice, vomiting and death.
This article originally appeared in The Sun and has been reproduced with permission