Influenza is the pathogen most likely to trigger a new pandemic in the near future, according to leading scientists, as the Guardian points out. After all, it’s something that other media outlets have reported on in the past month, including Sky News and CNN.

So, according to the British media, an international survey, to be published next weekend, will reveal that 57% of senior disease experts now believe that a strain of the flu virus will be the cause of the next pandemic of deadly infectious diseases.

Why would the next pandemic be caused by the flu?

The belief that influenza is the world’s biggest pandemic threat is based on long-term research showing that it is constantly evolving and mutating, said Jon Salmanton-García of the University of Cologne, who conducted the study.

“Every winter the flu comes along,” he said. “You could describe these outbreaks as small pandemics. They are pretty much controlled because the different strains that cause them are not infectious enough, but that won’t necessarily be the case forever.”

Details of the study, which included data from a total of 187 senior scientists, will be revealed at the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) conference in Barcelona next weekend.

What is Disease X

The next most likely cause of a pandemic, after the flu, is a virus called Disease X that is still unknown to science, according to 21% of the experts involved in the study. They believe the next pandemic will be caused by a yet-to-be-identified microorganism that will appear out of nowhere, as the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the cause of the coronavirus, did when it started infecting people in 2019.

Indeed, some scientists still believe that Sars-CoV-2 remains a threat, with 15% of the scientists involved in the study identifying it as the most likely cause of a pandemic in the near future.

Other deadly microorganisms such as Lassa, Nipah, Ebola and Zika viruses were rated as serious global threats by only 1% to 2% of respondents. “Influenza remained, very largely, the number one threat in terms of pandemic potential in the eyes of the vast majority of the world’s scientists,” Salmanton-García added.

Global alert on avian influenza

Last week, the World Health Organisation expressed fears about the alarming spread of the H5N1 strain of influenza that is causing millions of cases of bird flu around the world. This outbreak began in 2020 and has led to the death or killing of tens of millions of poultry and has also wiped out millions of wild birds.

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More recently, the virus has spread to mammalian species, including domestic cattle that are now infected in 12 US states, further raising fears about the risks to humans. The more mammalian species the virus infects, the more chances it has to evolve into a strain that is dangerous to humans, Daniel Goldhill, of the Royal Veterinary College, told the journal Nature last week.

The emergence of the H5N1 virus in cattle was a surprise, added virologist Ed Hutchinson, from the University of Glasgow. “Pigs can get bird flu, but until recently cattle hadn’t. They were infected with their own strains of the disease.

So the emergence of H5N1 in cows was a shock. It means that the risks of passing the virus to more and more farm animals and then from them to humans are becoming greater and greater. The more the virus spreads, the more the chances of it mutating so that it can spread to humans goes up and up.”