When fear spreads faster than the disease

Social media amplifies panic with every new outbreak, but the real challenge lies in fostering science literacy and measured vigilance.

- Hsu Li Yang

In November 2023, China's capital, Beijing and Liaoning province saw a surge in hospitalizations after people were infected with the bacterial pathogen Mycoplasma pneumoniae. Many of those affected were children. The incident sparked a widespread sense of unease and uncertainty.

Similarly, alarm bells were raised when avian influenza (H5N1) spread among cattle herds throughout the United States in 2024, with occasional human infections as well as a human death earlier in January.

Such reactions are common whenever new respiratory outbreaks occur, especially when these involve pathogens that are less well known outside healthcare and research communities. It's partly because of the Covid-19 imprint on our psyche—for better or worse—which will likely linger on for years.

Recently, the spike in respiratory illnesses throughout China has transiently ratcheted up anxiety worldwide regarding a possible human metapneumovirus (hMPV) pandemic.

The increased reporting of outbreaks caused by lesser-known pathogens in mainstream and social media reflects both greater public interest and the wider adoption of more diagnostic tests in the healthcare sector.

Testing for hMPV, for instance, is not routinely done for individuals with respiratory illnesses even within Singapore's technologically advanced healthcare system. However, it is increasingly diagnosed worldwide in very ill patients—particularly young children—with severe lung infections, where it is one of a panel of potential respiratory pathogens that can be identified via commercial multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.

Before 2008, such testing was only performed on an experimental basis in research rather than service laboratories.

Of the three pathogens mentioned above, current scientific understanding is that only avian influenza will have the potential to cause a pandemic anywhere near the scale of Covid-19 or the 20th-century influenza pandemics.