You may have heard about the new pandemic called “Disease X“, caused by a virus 20 times more deadly than COVID. And now you’ll be happy to learn that, contrary to claims circulating on social media, it’s not a real disease, but just part of a thought experiment.
As noted in the article compiled by Lifehacker, much of the mainstream news coverage of Disease X has made it clear that it’s a hypothetical threat that brought world leaders together to discuss what they would do if they knew another deadly pandemic was coming. Social media, however, ignored this fact, leaving only posts implying that Disease X already exists. It didn’t help that the World Health Organization (WHO) included Disease X on its list of priority diseases, along with COVID-19, Ebola, and Zika.
Of course, this hypothetical disease appears in scare quotes and with an asterisk, alerting readers that it’s a hypothetical and unknown disease, but that important detail may not catch everyone’s attention.
In other words, the WHO says it is prioritizing research into the top eight priority diseases and research that could help the world cope with future outbreaks that are not yet known. The international public health community uses disease X as shorthand for “What if there is another, worse pandemic? So when world leaders gathered in Davos during the World Economic Forum to discuss Disease X, they were talking about preparing for a pandemic, not a specific, known disease.
The term “Disease X” was coined in 2018 (before COVID), and it has even been argued that COVID should be considered the first true X disease. It was also argued that if world leaders paid more attention to Disease X preparedness, we might have a better response to a real-world pandemic outbreak. Giving it a more real-sounding name, such as “Disease X” rather than “another pandemic,” helps create a scenario that can be debated. Unfortunately, with the possibility of this debate comes the fact that false news is being spread on the Internet.
Of course, even if Disease X is not real, we need to remember that there is always a risk of a new outbreak in the future, and we need to be prepared.
WHAT IS DISEASE X?
So, what is Disease X? The term was coined many years ago as an idea to get scientists to work on medical countermeasures against not only known but also unknown infectious threats (for example, the novel coronaviruses causing COVID-19). The idea was to encourage the development of technologies that could be rapidly applied in response to a range of potentially risky future pandemics.
In 2017, the World Health Organization added Disease X to the short list of pathogens considered a priority for research, alongside well-known ones such as SARS and Ebola. The current list includes Covid-19, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola virus, Marburg virus disease, Lassa fever, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Rift Valley fever, Zika virus and Disease X. The World Health Organization has added the following information next to the term Disease X: Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international pandemic could be caused by a pathogen not currently known to cause human disease. The R&D Plan clearly aims to enable early R&D preparation, which is also relevant to an unknown “Disease X”.
