A disease that swells the brain 75 times more deadly than the coronavirus could mutate and become the next pandemic that kills millions, scientists warned.
Experts told Sun Online how a series of emerging diseases could trigger another global outbreak – and this time it could be “The Big One”.
The Nipah virus, transmitted by fruit bats, is the main candidate for serious concern, they fear.
Severe brain edema, seizures and vomiting are just some of the symptoms of this highly potent disease – which was first discovered in 1999 in Malaysia.
Outbreaks in South and Southeast Asia show that the virus is extremely deadly, with a 40 to 75 percent mortality rate.
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The death rate for COVID-19 is about one percent, according to Imperial College, so a Nipah pandemic would kill many more people.
It was also identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the 16 priority pathogens for research and development due to its potential to trigger an epidemic.
And frighteningly, Nipah is just one of the 260 known viruses with epidemic potential.
The virus is a concern due to its long incubation period of up to 45 days, which means that people can spread for more than a month before becoming ill, and their ability to breed between species.
Nipah also has an exceptionally high rate of mutation and it is feared that a strain better adapted to human infections could spread rapidly across the well-interconnected countries of Southeast Asia.
And while COVID-19 devastated the world, killing nearly 2.5 million people, it has already been warned that the next pandemic could be much worse.
Dr. Melanie Saville, CEPI’s director of vaccine research and development, warned that the world needs to be prepared for the next “big problem”.
The conflict between humans and nature as populations expand and habitats are repressed is considered to be the main cause of new diseases – and that’s exactly what happened to Nipah when he first infected pig farmers in Malaysia.
Dr. Rebecca Dutch, chairman of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the University of Kentucky and a world leader in the study of viruses, said that although there are no outbreaks of Nipah in the world, they do occur periodically and it is “extremely likely” that we will see most.
“Nipah is one of the viruses that could be the cause of a new pandemic. Several things about Nipah are very worrying, ”said Dr. Dutch.
“Many other viruses in this family (like measles) transmit well among people, so there is a concern that a variant of Nipah with increased transmission may arise.
“The death rate for this virus is between 45% and 75% depending on the outbreak – so this is much higher than COVID-19. Nipah has been shown to be transmitted through food, as well as through contact with human or animal excretions.
“Nipah’s incubation period can be quite long and it is unclear whether transmission can occur during this period.”
Like fruit bats, pigs contracted the disease by eating infected mangoes and are known to transmit the disease to humans.
More than a million pigs believed to be infected with the Nipah virus have been slaughtered in Malaysia to prevent them from being transmitted to humans.
Dr. Jonathan Epstein, vice president of science and outreach for the EcoHealth Alliance, explained how they are tracking the Nipah virus and are concerned about its potential.
“We know very little about the genetic variety of Nipah-related viruses in bats, and what we don’t want to happen is for a strain to appear that is more transmissible among people,” said Dr. Epstein.
“So far, Nipah is spread by close contact with an infected person, especially someone with respiratory disease, through droplets, and we generally don’t see large chains of transmission.
“However, with enough opportunity to spread from bats to people, and among people, a strain can emerge that is better adapted to spread among people.
“This is a zoonotic virus knocking at the door and we have to really work now to understand where human cases are occurring and try to reduce the opportunities for an overflow, so that it never has a chance to adapt to humans.”
THE BIG’
And Dr. Saville warned that we need to be ready for the next “big problem”, wherever it comes from.
“Most crucially, we shouldn’t just look at Nipah,” she said.
“We know that a future pandemic is inevitable and there are many other emerging infectious diseases that are recognized as having pandemic potential.
“This includes threats from known diseases, such as the flu, as well as new or still identified pathogens, known as ‘Disease X’.
“With environmental changes, 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 need to be prepared for the next ‘big’.”
Dr. Saville added that CEPI is studying the production of a library of vaccine prototypes that can target all coronaviruses at once.
She added that they would take advantage of what they learned from COVID-19 to try to eliminate the risk of a future pandemic.
The Executive Director of the Access to Medicine Foundation, Jayasree K Iyer, also pointed out superbugs as a major pandemic risk.
She said: “Antibiotic resistance already causes more than 700,000 deaths each year, including more than 200,000 infant deaths.
“Antibiotics are used for treatment in almost all cases of severe COVID-19, thus leading to an increasing number of bacteria becoming 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 specific drugs or vaccines for the Nipah virus.
But the next pandemic may well come from a pathogen currently unknown to us.
The unknown outbreak, known as Disease X, can trigger an outbreak worse than the Black Death, if more is not done to control zoonotic diseases.
Of the 1.67 million unknown viruses on the planet, up to 827,000 of them may have the capacity to infect people from animals, according to the EcoHealth Alliance.
Southeast Asia, South and Central Africa, areas around the Amazon and eastern Australia were identified as the areas most at risk for new diseases in a study published in Nature Communications.
Environmental writer John Vidal, who is working on a book that reveals the links between nature and disease, predicted that the world faces a new pandemic on a scale of the Black Death.
Given the popularity of air travel and global commerce, a virus can spread across the world, unknowingly, spread by asymptomatic carriers, “in a few weeks, killing tens of millions of people before the borders could be closed,” he adds.
He said: “Humanity has changed its relationship with wild and farmed animals, destroying their habitats and crowding them – and the process … is just accelerating.
“If we are unable to assess the seriousness of the situation, this current pandemic may just be a precursor to something much more serious.”
WORST PANDEMIC WORLD
These are the most deadly disease outbreaks in history – with often the death toll that currently triggered by Covid.
• Black Plague – Something between 75 and 200 million people lost their lives – up to 60 percent of the entire population of Europe – when the plague devastated the continent from 1346 to 1353.
It was probably transmitted to humans through 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 horror of the Great War in 1918, a disaster that killed twice as many people as the conflict that arose with the Spanish flu.
Between 17 million and 100 million people died during the pandemic that lasted until 1920 – but there is currently no consensus on the origin of the virus, although it appears to have avian genes.
• Justinian plague – It is believed to be the same bacteria responsible for the Black Death, the plague devastated Europe and Western Asia, killing between 15 million and 100 million people in 541 and 542AD.
It is also believed to have spread to mice carrying fleas – spreading to the Byzantine Empire via grain ships from Egypt.
• HIV / AIDS pandemic – Still devastating parts of the world, an estimated 35 million people have been killed by the insidious virus since 1981.
It is believed that it went from primates to humans and was potentially disseminated for the first time through the game meat trade.
• The third plague – The bubonic plague hit China again in 1855, from where it spread and killed up to 15 million people.
The WHO estimated that the bacterium was growing wildly until 1960 – only then with the end of the pandemic, and they continue to monitor closely any outbreak of the plague.
DISEASES IN THE WHO HAZARD LIST
The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised priority pathogens for research due to the threat posed by a widespread epidemic – these being some of the biggest concerns:
•Ebola – Six African nations were put on alert by WHO after Guinea declared it was suffering from another Ebola epidemic. The disease that killed more than 11,000 people in the region. This causes fever, headaches, muscle pain and bleeding in the ears, eyes, nose or mouth.
• SARS – It is believed that the virus first emerged from bats in China, such as COVID-19, triggering an epidemic in 2002-2004 that killed 774 people. SARS is an airborne virus and can spread through small droplets of saliva similarly to COVID-19 and the flu.
• MERS – A bug that is believed to have spread from bats to camels and humans in the Middle East. It is not as infectious as SARS or COVID, but it has a mortality rate of around 35%.
• Rift Valley fever – A zoonotic disease that is transmitted mainly to man through the blood of infected animals and mosquitoes. The most extreme forms of the virus can cause blindness, jaundice, blood vomiting and death.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission