Global leaders are trying to get ahead of Disease X — the name used by the World Health Organization to "indicate an unknown pathogen that could cause a serious international epidemic." Preparing now for the next global pandemic is vital, according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, director-general at the WHO.
"Disease X is a placeholder for an unknown pathogen that could cause a global emergency," Dr. Tedros said in a Jan. 17 post on X, formerly Twitter. "History has taught us that we must anticipate new threats. Failing to prepare leaves the world prepared to fail."
In 2022 the WHO recruited 300 scientists to identify the most infectious pathogens in a list, which previously had not been revised since 2018, which included reference to Disease X.
Now, as part of the World Economic Forum's 2024 Annual Meeting, which was held Jan. 15-19 in Switzerland, Dr. Tedros detailed the "initiatives that are supporting countries to prepare better, including investment in local production, surveillance and development of a generational #PandemicAccord," he wrote on X.
Many experts disagree about when the next pandemic could emerge, but health professionals and researchers nationally and worldwide are aiming to anticipate what type of virus could cause it, to develop a more organized response than COVID-19.
"There are strains of viruses that have very high mortality rates that could develop the ability to transmit efficiently from human to human," Amesh Adalja, MD, infectious disease and emergency medicine physician with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told CBS News.
The next pandemic-causing virus, will likely be a respiratory viral infection, Dr. Adalja told CBS.
During the COVID-19 pandemic response, it was not necessarily medicine that went wrong, according to infectious disease expert Rebecca Wurtz, MD, a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis, which is also home to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
"It wasn't medicine that went wrong during COVID," Dr. Wurtz previously told Becker's in a July 2023 interview. "Medicine and healthcare did a fantastic job in difficult circumstances. It was public health that didn't succeed, and I think hasn't been fixed."
She added that from her perspective and based on her research, the next pandemic could be "between six and nine years" away.