THE next pandemic could be closer than we think and deadlier than Covid 19, experts have warned.
It is not yet known what form it will take, but it could kill 50 million people like the Spanish flu and be sparked by a million unknown viruses.
In an excerpt of their new book for the Mail Online, Kate Bingham and Tim Hames gave a glimpse of how the next pandemic might unfold.
"The 1918–19 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, twice as many as were killed in World War I," they said.
"Today, we could expect a similar death toll from one of the many viruses that already exist.
"Today, there are more viruses busily replicating and mutating than all the other life forms on our planet combined.
"Not all of them pose a threat to humans, of course — but plenty do."
The experts continued: "So far, scientists are aware of 25 virus families, each of them comprising hundreds or thousands of different viruses, any of which could evolve to cause a pandemic.
"Worse still, they estimate there could be more than one million undiscovered viruses which may be able to jump from one species to another, mutate dramatically and kill millions of human beings."
Bingham and Hames explained how we got somewhat "lucky" with the Covid 19 pandemic despite it costing the lives of at least 20 million people.
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"The point is that the vast majority of people infected with the virus managed to recover," they said.
"Ebola, on the other hand, has a fatality rate of around 67 per cent.
"Bird flu is not far behind at 60 per cent.
"Even MERS hit 34 per cent.
"So we certainly can’t bank on the next pandemic being easily contained."
Fellow expert Dr Jophn McCauley, a leading member of the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, has also given his insights as to how the world's next pandemic might look like.
He told The Sun Online that the dreaded Spanish Flu which killed around 50 million people around the globe could be the cause of the next pandemic.
As the world recovered from the Covid-19 outbreak, scientists find themselves desperately searching for the other dangerous viruses likely to cause the next pandemic, which could lead to "case counts and death tolls similar to the Spanish Flu".
Dr McCauley, director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre, revealed one of his biggest concerns to be seasonal flu, and warned that a future pandemic is likely to come from a flu strain – despite flagging flu figures.
Covid measures such as social distancing and regularly washing hands have contributed to one of the lowest flu circulations for more than a century, according to Dr McCauley.
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But common viruses such as seasonal flu could be much more dangerous in a post-pandemic world.
The 1918 influenza pandemic, known as the Spanish Flu, infected around a third of the world's population and is believed to have originated in birds.
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