Urgent warning regarding influenza…Does it carry with it the new deadly epidemic?

Al-Arabiya reported that months ago, the World Health Organization sounded the alarm, anticipating that the world would face the emergence of new pandemics in the future, after Corona subsided, as it was just a matter of time.

An international survey, due to be published at the end of next week, will reveal that 57% of leading disease experts now believe that a strain of influenza virus will be the cause of the next global outbreak of the deadly infectious disease.

“The belief that influenza is the biggest pandemic threat in the world is based on long-term research showing that it is constantly evolving and mutating,” said John Salmanton Garcia of the University of Cologne, who conducted the study.

He also added: “Every winter, influenza appears. You can describe these outbreaks as small pandemics that are more or less controlled because the variants causing them are not severe enough. But this does not have to be the case forever.”

He also added, “Influenza has largely remained the primary threat in terms of its ability to spread epidemically in the eyes of a large majority of the world’s scientists.”

After influenza, the next most likely cause of a pandemic may be a virus called “Disease X,” which is still scientifically unknown, according to 21% of the experts who participated in the study.

They also believe that the next epidemic will be caused by a microorganism that has not yet been identified and will appear suddenly, just as the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, appeared when it began infecting humans at the end of 2019.

Other deadly microorganisms, such as Lassa, Nipah, Ebola, and Zika viruses, were rated as serious global threats by only 1% to 2% of respondents. (Arabic)