Scientists have warned that a brain-swelling disease that is 75 times more deadly than the coronavirus could change.
Experts told Sun Online how a number of emerging diseases could cause another global outbreak – and this time it could be ‘The Big One’.
The fruit bat-borne virus Nipah is a major candidate for serious concern, they fear.
Severe brain swelling, seizures and vomiting are just some of the symptoms of this extremely powerful disease – first discovered in Malaysia in 1999.
Outbreaks in South and Southeast Asia show that the virus is extremely deadly, with a mortality rate of between 40 and 75 percent.
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According to Imperial College, the death rate from COVID-19 is about one percent, so a Nipah pandemic will kill many more people.
It has also been named by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the 16 priority pathogens for research and development because of its potential to cause an epidemic.
And cool, Nipah is just one of the 260 known viruses with epidemic potential.
The virus is so worrying due to the long incubation period of up to 45 days, which means that humans can spread for more than a month before becoming ill, and the ability to cross between species.
Nipah also has an extraordinarily high rate of mutation and there are fears that a strain better adapted to human infections could spread rapidly across the well-interconnected countries of Southeast Asia.
And while COVID-19 has devastated the world and killed 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, warned that the world must be prepared for the next ‘big’.
People who clash with nature as populations expand and repatriate habitats are considered the main drivers of new diseases – and this is exactly what happened to Nipah when it first infected the pig farmers in Malaysia.
Dr Rebecca Dutch, chair of the University of Kentucky’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry and a world leader in the study of viruses, said that although there are no current Nipah outbreaks in the world, they occur periodically and are very 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,” said Dr.
‘Many other viruses in the family transmit (such as measles) well between people, so there is concern that a Nipah variant with increased transmission may develop.
“The mortality rate for this virus is between 45% and 75%, depending on the outbreak – it is therefore much higher than COVID-19. Nipah has been shown to transmit through food as well as through contact with human or animal secretions.
“The incubation period for Nipah can be quite long, and it may be unclear whether transmission can occur during this time.”
In addition to fruit bats, pigs contracted the disease by eating infected mangoes and are known to transmit the disease to humans.
More than one million pigs suspected of being infected with the Nipah virus have been slaughtered in Malaysia to prevent them from transmitting it to humans.
Dr Jonathan Epstein, vice president for science and outreach at the EcoHealth Alliance, explained how they detect the Nipah virus and is concerned about its potential.
“We know very little about the genetic diversity of Nipah-related viruses in bats, and what we do not want is a strain that is more contagious among humans,” said Dr. Epstein said.
‘So far, Nipah has been spreading under close contact with an infected person, especially someone with respiratory illness through droplets, and in general we do not see large transmission chains.
‘However, if there is enough opportunity to spread from bats to humans and among humans, a tension can arise that is better adapted to spread among humans.
“It’s a zoonotic virus knocking on the door, and we must now really work to understand where human cases occur, and try to reduce the chances of a spill so that it never gets the chance to reach people. to fit. “
THE BIG ONE ‘
And Dr Saville warned that we must be ready for the next ‘big’, wherever it comes from.
“The most important thing is that we should not just look at Nipah,” she said.
‘We know that a future pandemic is inevitable, and there are many other emerging infectious diseases that are considered pandemic potential.
“This includes known disease threats, such as the flu, as well as new ones or as a result of identified pathogens known as ‘Disease X’.
“With environmental change such as climate change, habitat destruction and human invasion in previously isolated areas, human interactions have created a fertile space for viruses to jump between species, and therefore we must be prepared for the next ‘big’.”
Dr Saville added that CEPI is producing a library of prototype vaccines that can target all coronaviruses at once.
She added that they would build on what they learned from COVID-19 in an attempt to eliminate the risk of a future pandemic.
Executive Director of the Access to Medicine Foundation, Jayasree K Iyer, also calls superbugs a major pandemic risk.
She said: “Antibiotic resistance causes more than 700,000 deaths each year, including more than 200,000 infant deaths.
“Antibiotics are used in almost all cases of severe COVID-19 for treatment, leading to an increasing number of bacteria resistant to these antibiotics.”
Ms Iyer and experts in the field are concerned that pharmaceutical companies are not doing enough to create vaccines in time for the next pandemic.
For example, there are no drugs or vaccines specifically related to the Nipah virus.
But the next pandemic could possibly come from a pathogen that is currently unknown to us.
The unknown outbreak, known as Disease X, can cause an outbreak worse than the Black Death if no more is done to control zoonotic diseases.
Out of the 1.67 million unknown viruses on the planet, up to 827,000 of these could have the ability to infect humans, according to the EcoHealth Alliance.
Southeast Asia, South and Central Africa, areas around the Amazon and Eastern Australia have all been identified as the areas most at risk for new diseases in a study published in Nature Communications.
Environmental author John Vidal, who is working on a book revealing the links between nature and disease, predicted that the world would have a new pandemic in the Black Death.
Given the popularity of air travel and global trade, a virus could be unknowingly spread back and forth around the world by asymptomatic carriers, ‘within a few weeks, killing tens of millions of people before borders could be closed’, he adds.
He said: ‘Mankind has changed its relationship with wildlife as well as farm animals, destroying and consolidating their habitats – and the process … is only accelerating.
“If we can not realize the seriousness of the situation, this current pandemic could only be a precursor to something even more serious.”
WORLD’S WORST PANDEMY
These are the deadliest disease outbreaks in history – with many times the death toll currently triggered by Covid.
• Black Death Somewhere between 75 and 200 million people lost their lives – up to 60 percent of the entire population of Europe – when the plague plagued the continent from 1346 to 1353.
It was most likely transmitted to humans via fleas that fed on black rats on merchant ships in the Mediterranean before spreading across Europe and North Africa.
• Spanish flu While the world was trying to recover from the horrors of the Great War in 1918, a catastrophe that killed twice as many people as the conflict with the Spanish flu arose.
Somewhere between 17 and 100 million people die during the pandemic that lasted until 1920 – but there is currently no consensus on where the virus originated, although it appears to have bird genes.
• Plague of Justinian – Believing that the same bacteria were responsible for the Black Death, the plague plagued Europe and West Asia by killing between 15 million and 100 million people in 541 and 542AD.
It is thought to be spread by rats that also carry fleas and spread to the Byzantine Empire via grain ships arriving from Egypt.
• HIV / Aids pandemic About 35 million people have been destroyed by the world since 1981.
It is believed that it jumped from primates to humans and was possibly first spread by the bush meat trade.
• The Third Plague The Bubonic plague struck again in China in 1855, from where it spread and killed up to 15 million people.
WHO estimated that the bacteria were on the rise until 1960 – with only the end of the pandemic, and they are closely monitoring the outbreak of the plague.
DISEASES ON WHOSE HAZARD LIST
The World Health Organization (WHO) has an increase in priority pathogens for research due to the threat of a widespread epidemic – which is the biggest concern:
•Ebola Six African countries have been warned 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, headache, muscle aches and bleeding from the ears, eyes, nose or mouth.
• SAID The virus is thought to have first originated in bats in China, such as COVID-19, which caused an epidemic in 2002 to 2004 that killed 774 people. SARS is a virus in the air and can spread in a similar way through small droplets of saliva as COVID-19 and flu.
• MERS – A bug that is thought to have spread from bats to camels to humans in the Middle East. It is not as contagious as SARS or COVID, but has a mortality rate of about 35%.
• Rift Valley fever – A zoonotic disease that is transmitted primarily to humans through infected animal blood and mosquitoes. The most extreme forms of the virus can cause blindness, jaundice, vomiting of blood and death.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and has been reproduced with permission