PandemicsThis is not a drill: 5 reasons why the experts are worried about the next pandemic

By Ali Moore

Earlier this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global alert for a disease that doesn’t exist yet. A potentially savage pathogen called Disease X.

“History tells us that it is likely the next big outbreak will be something we have not seen before,” says WHO committee science adviser John-Arne Rottingen.

By officially designating an unknown pathogen as a likely cause of a global outbreak, the WHO has upped the ante on the need to be better prepared.

While we may not know what ‘Disease X’ is, in all probability it’s coming. Conditions are ripe for its arrival.

But are we ready? Here’s five reasons why we should answer that question carefully.

1. The number of diseases in increasing
In May of this year in a Washington ballroom, a novel parainfluenza virus was unleashed on the world. It spread rapidly from person to person through coughing, and killed 20 percent of those it infected. The first vaccine failed, and within a year 150 million were dead.

That was the hypothetical scenario , run by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, to pinpoint the challenges the US and the world would face in the event of a truly devastating outbreak. Their virus was manmade, a bio terrorist attack on the world.

Closer to home, the Doherty Institute in Melbourne unleashed its own novel pathogen that spread from a music festival in regional Victoria to the rest of the country.

Preparing for the worst possible scenario is high on many agendas around the world - spurred on by a widely held understanding that the next pandemic is a case of when, not if.

Researchers have found both the number of outbreaks of infectious diseases and the types of diseases have increased in recent decades, with the number of outbreaks per year more than tripling since 1980.