A THREAT CALLED DISEASE X

IS THE NEXT KILLER VIRUS ALREADY HERE? THE WHO PREDICTS IT WILL BE 'ZOONOTIC', AND 20 TIMES DEADLIER THAN COVID

- SONALI ACHARJEE

IT WAS IN NOVEMBER 2022 THAT THE LAST COVID WARD was dismantled in the national capital. The largest of Delhi's 11 pandemic wards, the space in LNJP Hospital used to be overrun with anxious families, breathless patients and frantic doctors. Today, it has once again reverted to being a teaching classroom. The beds and equipment are gone, but the lessons of the pandemic remain. Doctors and scientists in the country remain on alert for the next major disease outbreak. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls it 'Disease X', expects it to be zoonotic (transmitted naturally from vertebrate animals to humans, or the reverse), and most likely an RNA virus. Its announcement has spurred research and predictions on when the next pandemic will hit the world.

Tata Institute for Genetics and Society (TIGS) director Rakesh Mishra, also the former director of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), who is currently involved in surveying the country for novel viruses, says, "Covid isn't the only virus that's a worry. We have thousands of individual viruses of concern and millions that have not been discovered yet. We should not be looking at the next virus to emerge from another country either.

We have plenty of high-risk areas in India too where a novel virus can make the jump from an animal to a human host. The more human settlements start to spread into forested areas, the more we can expect an increase in likelihood of a new virus emerging in human beings." Kate Bingham, the former chair of the UK's vaccine taskforce, predicts that the next pandemic could be 20 times deadlier than Covid, claiming up to 50 million human lives. "If you look at the pattern of recent zoonotic viruses, from Nipah to Covid, they have all been contagious and all been harmful to human health. Even if the next virus is not a global pandemic, it can still do a lot of damage on a local scale. We need to be on our guard," adds Mishra.