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The mysterious Disease X could hit at any time – and may kill far more than Covid did during the pandemic.
The ominous warning comes from Dame Kate Bingham, who ran the UK's Vaccine Taskforce during the latter part of 2020. Scientists have often warned of Disease X being deadly, despite not knowing what it is and it being something that doesn't actually exist.
However, joining the list of panicked experts, Dame Kate told the Daily Mail: “Imagine Disease X is as infectious as measles with the fatality rate of Ebola. Somewhere in the world, it’s replicating, and sooner or later, somebody will start feeling sick. That’s why we need to discover – in advance of the next pandemic – a collection of different prototype vaccines for every threatening virus family that we know about.
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“We’d then have a head start – because we’d be able to engineer those vaccines to target the very specific features of Disease X. Ideally, Disease X will be neutralised before it starts spreading across the globe and mutating (which it certainly will, if left unchecked).
"Let me put it this way: the 1918–19 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, twice as many as were killed in World War I. Today, we could expect a similar death toll from one of the many viruses that already exist.”
In early 2021, it was warned that an outbreak of Disease X could wipe out 75 million people and cause pandemics every five years. The disease may also be worse than the Black Death and caused by increasing human activity in animal habitats, it was claimed.
An editorial in The Lancet warned Covid is "not the last health emergency and not the worst". It explained: "Climate change has shown how an existential threat to human civilisation can galvanise a sense of urgency in a whole-of-society response. Tackling zoonoses needs exactly the same."
Last month, a new UK-based lab was unveiled to help tackle Disease X. Porton Down is a state-of-the-art vaccine research facility where scientists will work to ensure future pandemics are stopped in their tracks and do not cause the same disruption to everyday life as Covid did.
It was recently unveiled to the public and is based at the UK Health and Security Agency's campus in Wiltshire. Live viruses are being kept on-site in specialist containment facilities, with researchers looking at pathogens that do not yet have a vaccine or ones where immunisation could be improved such as flu, mpox or hantavirus.
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- Science
- Coronavirus
- Unsolved Mysteries
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