{"id":5119,"date":"2023-11-01T07:33:56","date_gmt":"2023-11-01T12:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=5119"},"modified":"2023-11-01T09:11:49","modified_gmt":"2023-11-01T14:11:49","slug":"the-viral-threat-almost-no-one-is-thinking-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/11\/01\/the-viral-threat-almost-no-one-is-thinking-about\/","title":{"rendered":"The Viral Threat Almost No One Is Thinking About"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Atlantic<\/a> Flu viruses and coronavirus started the last few pandemics. Could the next one be a paramyxovirus? Whether it begins next week, next year, or next decade, another pandemic is on its way. Researchers can\u2019t predict precisely when or how the outbreak might begin.\u00a0Some 1.6 million viruses<\/a>\u00a0are estimated to lurk in the world\u2019s mammalian and avian wildlife, up to half of which could spill into humans; an untold number are\u00a0attempting exactly that<\/a>, at this very moment, bumping up against the people hunting, eating, and encroaching on those creatures. (And that\u2019s just viruses: Parasites, fungi, and bacteria represent major infectious dangers too.) The only true certainty in the pandemic forecast is that the next threat will be here sooner than anyone would like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But scientists can at least make an educated guess about what<\/em> might catalyze the next Big One. Three main families of viruses, more than most others, keep scientists up at night: flu viruses, coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses, in descending order of threat. Together, those groups make up \u201cthe trifecta of respiratory death,\u201d Sara Cherry, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flu and coronavirus have a recent track record of trouble: Since 1918, flu viruses have sparked four pandemics, all the while continuing to pester us on a seasonal basis; some scientists worry that another major human outbreak may be brewing now, as\u00a0multiple<\/a>\u00a0H5 flu viruses<\/a>\u00a0continue to spread from birds to mammals. The past two decades have also featured three major and deadly coronavirus outbreaks: the original SARS epidemic that began in late 2002; MERS, which spilled into humans\u2014likely from camels\u2014in 2012; and SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic pathogen that\u2019s been plaguing us since the end of 2019. Common-cold-causing coronaviruses, too, remain a fixture of daily living\u2014likely relics of ancient animal-to-human spillovers that we kept transmitting amongst ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paramyxoviruses, meanwhile, have mostly been \u201csimmering in the background,\u201d says Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist at Cornell. Unlike flu viruses and coronaviruses, which have already clearly \u201cproven themselves\u201d as tier-one outbreak risks, paramyxoviruses haven\u2019t yet been caught causing a bona fide pandemic. But they seem poised to do so, and they likely have managed the feat in the past. Like flu viruses and coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses can spread through the air, sometimes\u00a0very\u00a0<\/em>rapidly. That\u2019s certainly been the case with\u00a0measles<\/a>, a paramyxovirus that is \u201cliterally the most transmissible human virus on the planet,\u201d says Paul Duprex, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh. And, like flu viruses and coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses are found in a wide range of animals;\u00a0more are being discovered<\/a>\u00a0wherever researchers look. Consider canine distemper virus, which has been found in, yes, canines, but also in raccoons, skunks, ferrets, otters, badgers, tigers, and seals. Paramyxoviruses, like flu viruses and coronaviruses, have also repeatedly shown their potential to\u00a0hopscotch from those wild creatures into us<\/a>. Since 1994,\u00a0Hendra virus<\/a>\u00a0has caused multiple highly lethal outbreaks in horses, killing four humans along the way; the closely related Nipah virus has, since 1998,\u00a0spread repeatedly<\/a>\u00a0among both pigs and people<\/a>, carrying fatality rates that can soar upwards of 50 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic Flu viruses and coronavirus started the last few pandemics. Could the next one be a paramyxovirus? Whether it begins next week, next year, or next decade, another pandemic is on its way. Researchers can\u2019t predict precisely when or how the outbreak might begin.\u00a0Some 1.6 million viruses\u00a0are estimated to lurk in the world\u2019s mammalian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-08.32.20.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5121,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119\/revisions\/5121"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}