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How worried should we be about Disease X?
(www.npr.org)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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Disease X is actually a concept. In academia, Disease X is covered in infectious disease focused courses, it is a placeholder concept referring to a pandemic pathogen which has not yet been characterized. Its purpose is to encourage proactive thinking and research about pathogens that could cause a pandemic. To see the term thrown around is pretty wild, but hopefully it's a bit of an overzealous or incorrect use of it. Not even sure if there's enough data available yet to classify it as Disease X, but it's R~o~ value is steadily on the rise, which is always concerning for a novel pathogen.
Surely a potential pandemic pathogen. This is still an epidemic, isn't it?
You're not wrong there, hopefully the pathogen is sequenced soon and researchers start working on an approach to prevent further spread and treat those already infected.
The fact the numbers are like this in a remote area of Africa demonstrates when it gets to a more dense population, it will only get worse. More viral infections means more mutations. A virus will always mutate, it's how they survive. These mutations almost always result in a novel version of the virus better adept to spread in the host's population. There's also a good portion of these new versions which are no longer infectious as well. It's basically a numbers game for the virus.
But Disease X by definition will always start in one specific area, then spread throughout the population.