We have just emerged from a respiratory virus pandemic, but as has been happening throughout the history of humanity, there will be new pandemics in the futureand that is why pharmaceutical companies and also people themselves must prepare for what may come in the coming years.
And the British newspaper Dailymail had talked with three expert virologists who predict a coming pandemic for the coming years, the majority agreeing on what It will be a new coronavirus like COVID-19, or the dreaded bird fluwhich has already threatened us in recent years.
The worst of all is that the next pandemic will be much more deadly than the current one, around 40% of people who suffer from it could end up dying from the disease.
In any case, there is hope, because they consider that advances in the pharmaceutical field could lead to vaccines in a very short period of time after the appearance of the pandemic, and that could end up saving up to billions of lives.
bird flu
On the one hand, we have the doctor Leonard Mermelwho is an expert in infectious diseases, who considers that the next pandemic will be caused by avian influenza.
The avian influence or also known as bird fluis a virus that mainly affects birds and is transmitted through respiratory droplets, but in certain cases, it can cross the species division, also affecting mammals such as humans.
Brown University’s Mermel points out that the next pandemic would arise when a poultry worker sick with human flu catches bird flu, mutating the virus to move between species.
“These two viruses would then meet inside one of their cells and exchange genes to create a new chimeric virus,” he explains.
This new mutated virus would then spread rapidly from person to person through respiratory droplets.
This virus would have, according to the expert, a 30 to 40% mortality rate in infected people, and he considers that China would be the most likely place where it would appear.
He also considers that avian flu could end up causing a pandemic in the next 10 or 20 yearsand we have already been warned previously with different cases of infections in places such as Cambodia, Vietnam and China.
Another coronavirus
On the other hand, the doctor Martin Hirsch considers that the next pandemic would come from avian influenza or also a coronavirus.
Martin currently works at Massachusetts General Hospital and comments that this outbreak would probably be triggered when the viruses infected an intermediary animal such as a pig to mutate into another that can be transmitted to humans.
He comments that the disease could come from bats, while avian influenza would jump from domestic birds.
He comments that this pandemic could happen in the United States, Europe or China, where animals are kept in dirty conditions conducive to the spread of diseases.
I wouldn’t rule out a pandemic of viruses such as HIV, Ebola, yellow fever and dengue, but considers that a respiratory virus is more likely to be transmitted rapidly worldwide.
Mosquito pandemic
Finally, the doctor Elmer Gray has warned that the next pandemic could come from diseases caused by mosquitoes and ticks.
He currently works at the University of Georgia, and points out that the increase in temperatures, together with globalization, has generated a complicated situation in places like the United States in which specific outbreaks of infection appear very regularly. diseases.
Comment that warmer temperatures at night is driving the growth of mosquito populationsputting people at greater risk of infections.
He gives as an example that this year in Florida, Texas and Maryland cases of malaria transmitted locally by mosquitoes were recorded.
On the other hand, it does not rule out that a disease totally unknown today, also transmitted by mosquitoes, could cause the next pandemic.