Disease X

• After announcing that that COVID-19 was no longer a global health emergency, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that “Disease X” can lead to an “even deadlier” pandemic.

ABOUT DISEASE X

• Disease X is not real yet and has not been identified in any human beings.
• It represents a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic.
• The name was adopted by the WHO in 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen.
• Disease X could also be zoonotic, meaning that it could be caused by germs jumping from animals to humans.

PRIORITY LIST

• Apart from Disease X, Covid-19, Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Ebola virus disease, Marburg virus disease, Lassa fever, MERS-CoV and SARS, Nipah and henipaviral diseases, Rift Valley fever and Zika are other diseases on WHO’s priority diseases list.