UK expert warns of pandemic worse than Covid in new book

NEW DELHI: The former chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce Kate Bingham has in a new book warned of a next pandemic that could come from a million unknown viruses and kill about 50 million people like the Spanish Flu.

The excerpt of the book, co-authored with another vaccine boffin Tim Hames, published in the Daily Mail ex-plains how the next pandemic might unfold and calls for pandemic preparedness.

"The 1918-19 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, twice as many as were killed in World War I," they said.

"Today, we could expect a similar death toll from one of the many viruses that already exist. There are more vi-ruses busily replicating and mutating than all the other life forms on our planet combined. Not all of them pose a threat to humans, of course - but plenty do."

According to the experts, thousands of different viruses could evolve to spark a pandemic. There is also a risk that viruses could jump between species and "mutate dramatically".

"So far, scientists are aware of 25 virus families, each of them comprising hundreds or thousands of different vi-ruses, any of which could evolve to cause a pandemic," Bingham and Hames said.

In May, the World Health Organization (WHO) also warned of the threat of an “inevitable” next pandemic “Disease X, raising concerns across the globe. Disease X was first coined in 2018 by the WHO, a year before the Covid-19 pandemic struck the world. It is among the WHO’s “Blue print list priority diseases” that could cause the next deadly pandemic and includes Ebola, SARS and Zika. “Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious in-ternational epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease,” the WHO said. The Blueprint list highlights infectious diseases for which we lack medical countermeasures. (IANS)

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