World leaders convening in Switzerland’s Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF) this week will discuss concerns regarding the potential for a future pandemic that could kill 20 times more than the Covid-19 pandemic. The disease is currently known by the placeholder name of Disease X.
Disease X is a term used to refer to planning and preparation for a future international epidemic caused by a pathogen which is not yet known to cause diseases in humans.
WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will lead a panel consisting of Brazilian health minister Nisia Trindade Lima, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca’s chair of the board Michel Demaré, Royal Philips CEO Roy Jakobs, and Indian hospital chain Apollo’s executive vice-chairperson Preetha Reddy on Wednesday in a session “Preparing for Disease X”. There they will discuss “novel efforts needed to prepare healthcare systems for the multiple challenges ahead” if the world needs to be ready for a much deadlier pandemic, the WEF said.
The meetings are being held to encourage the development of platform technologies, including vaccines, drug therapies and diagnostic tests, so that in case a pandemic breaks out, skills and knowledge learned during these preparations could be applied and deployed to combat the sickness.
The attendees are holding the meeting because there are vast reservoirs of viruses circulating in the wildlife that pose potential threat to human health as they have the potential to spill over from animals to humans.
When Did Preparations for Disease X Start
The WHO cites the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa as a main reason for enabling “early cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant” for disease X. The global health agency highlights that 11,000 lives were lost because health agencies lacked products ready to deploy in time to save those lives during the Ebola outbreak.
The WHO then released a list of priority diseases and created an R&D Blueprint to accelerate development of a range of tools for these diseases. The diseases in WHO priority list are: Covid-19, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease, Lassa fever, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and SARS, Nipah and henipaviral diseases, Rift Valley fever, Zika, Disease X.
Research on Disease X in 2017 helped scientists to develop the first vaccine against Covid-19 326 days after the release of the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Researchers from Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), as part of the research on Disease X, are working on rapid response vaccine platforms which can develop new immunizations within 100 days of a virus, which has the potential to cause a pandemic, emerging, under a $3.5 billion plan.
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