Following the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, a virus that emerged in China in late 2019, another public health threat is emerging worldwide: disease X. Simply put, it is a disease of caused by a pathogen that has not yet been identified by scientists.
In his recent speech at the World Government Summit in Dubai, the WHO Director-General stated that the mysterious disease could be 20 times more deadly than COVID-19.
#PandemicAccord explainer 👇 pic.twitter.com/iHsw8PEXxd
- Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) February 14, 2024
The origin, symptoms, transmission and mortality are a total mystery. The alarm was raised by Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, biologist expert in immunology and current secretary general of the WHO.
It was he who declared the state of global health emergency (pandemic) due to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in March 2020. In his last speech at the World Government Summit conference in Dubai, the Ethiopian scientist underlined that the world is not ready for another disease.
Natural habitats continue to be destroyed, bringing people ever closer to wildlife; the notorious wet markets where people are constantly in contact with the carcasses and body fluids of potentially infected animals (wild and otherwise) have not been closed. All this brings us closer to the emergence of Disease X, which according to the WHO could be much more deadly than COVID-19.
"After COVID-19, millions of people are dying due to social, economic and political shocks that are still reverberating today," explained Dr. Ghebreyesus in his speech in Dubai. "The painful lessons we have learned risk being forgotten as attention turns to the many other crises facing our world. But if we fail to learn these lessons, we will pay dearly next time, and there will be another time. The cycle of panic and neglect has started to repeat itself", commented the immunologist.
The Director-General of WHO added:
It could be caused by an influenza virus, or a new coronavirus, or it could be caused by a new pathogen that we don't yet know about.