While the scare of novel coronavirus pandemic is not yet over, the doctor who helped discover the Ebola virus has forewarned that many pathogens and viruses could spread in the near future. Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum while speaking to CNN revealed that many new viruses are expected yet to known which he describes as “a threat to humanity.”
“We are now in a world where new pathogens will come out and that’s what constitutes a threat for humanity,” Tamfum told CNN. The professor expressed fear after a woman in the Democratic Republic of the Congo showed signs of hemorrhagic fever.
The woman tested negative for a number of tests, including ebola, making scientists tensed about the new lethal disease. The “X” in Disease X stands for unexpected. WHO said that it “represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.”
The new virus can spread at the pace COVID-19 and could have a mortality rate of about 50-90 percent. When scientists discovered the Ebola virus disease (EVD), the EVD had a mortality of around 88 percent.
Zoonoses like rabies, yellow fever, Lyme and brucellosis that jumped from animals to humans have caused epidemics and pandemics before. The deadly HIV emerged from Chimpanzee and then mutated into a fatal disease. MERS and SARS are all coronaviruses that have jumped from non-humans to humans. So the possibility of a new virus is a valid one.
The novel coronavirus pandemic, which hit world last year, has infected more than 86,476,173 individuals globally. The maximum cases have been reported in the United States, followed by India, Brazil and Russia. The virus has so far claimed 1,869,987 lives.
India alone has reported 1,03,74,932 COVID-19 cases, according to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) on Wednesday. Till now, 1,50,114 individuals have succumbed to illness, while 99,97,272 have recovered.
