Experts believe that "disease X" will appear after a person becomes infected with a mutated virus transmitted from an animal. Also, the risk of leakage of a dangerous pathogen from the laboratory cannot be excluded. But the rapid progress in the production of vaccines and antiviral drugs allows us to hope that the pharmaceutical industry will be able to quickly develop and implement effective treatment methods, Mir24 reports.
Dr. Leonard Mermel of Brown University said that the next pandemic will be caused by avian flu. The "zero patient" will be a poultry farm worker who, already suffering from "human" flu, will become infected with avian flu. Two viruses will meet inside the cell and exchange genes, creating a new chimeric virus.
This super virus will begin to spread rapidly from person to person and will cover the whole world. The expert estimated the mortality rate of this strain at 30-40% (for comparison, the mortality rate of the Wuhan coronavirus at the beginning of the pandemic was 5%).
Dr. Martin Hirsch of Massachusetts General Hospital (one of the largest clinical hospitals in the United States) also named avian influenza as the cause of the new pandemic. But a pandemic can also start with the coronavirus. An outbreak will occur when carriers of the virus (poultry or bats) infect an intermediate animal (for example, a pig) and mutate, becoming dangerous to humans.
The expert pointed out the particular danger of RNA viruses. They are more susceptible to mutations because RNA is less stable than DNA, and this increases the risk that they can cause a pandemic.
Dr. Elmer Gray from the University of Georgia considered the most dangerous diseases carried by insects. Global warming creates favorable conditions for the reproduction of mosquitoes and ticks, even in regions where they have not previously been encountered. In this regard, there is a risk of the return of diseases already forgotten in developed countries, such as malaria and dengue fever. In the USA, these diseases were eradicated in the 1940-50 years, but imported cases are periodically recorded. The expert also noted that a new, not yet known disease spread by mosquitoes may arise.
