The Black Death plague, monkey pox and bird flu are among 24 supposed threats that have been added to an the World Health Organization’s watchlist of pathogens that could trigger the next pandemic.
In the first update since the ‘Covid pandemic’ the WHO panel has decided to dramatically expanded the scope of its index of so-called priority pathogens.
MSN reports: Already notorious diseases like Zika, yellow fever and avian influenza have been added, alongside lesser known threats such as Sin Nombre virus – which jumps from deer mice to people and has a fatality rate of 30 per cent in the US. Several bacteria, including cholera, the plague and salmonella, have also been incorporated for the first time.
The watchlist may sound like more WHO jargon – especially its name, the R&D Blueprint for Epidemics – but its contents have become hugely influential since the first iteration was published in 2017.
Not only did it popularise the concept of ‘Disease X’, an as yet unknown pandemic threat, but the exercise pointed out the most dangerous diseases for which there were no vaccines, diagnostics or treatments. Since then, it has been used by scientists and research consortiums around the world to prioritise research.
“In our world, [the blueprint] has been a very big deal,” said Dr Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which funds vaccine research. “It helped focus attention on a set of pathogens that had been neglected, effectively because there were no commercial drivers for countermeasure development.”
He pointed to one example as the “signal success” to date: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), a close relative of Covid which featured on the first priority pathogen list.
“That certainly helped those of us who were trying to fund programmes to justify our investments in developing Mers vaccines,” Dr Hatchett told the Telegraph. “And it was that investment in solving the general coronavirus design problem that, I think, enabled the rapid pivot to Covid.
“At least the Moderna vaccine and the AstraZeneca vaccine were direct pivots from the Mers vaccine development programmes, so to that extent it’s been really, really important,” he said.
NOW – WHO's Tedros declares global "mpox" emergency. pic.twitter.com/2CPJE1JUFR
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