Experts call it Disease X – the next lethal pandemic that will infect the world and threaten once again to leave Britain stricken and paralysed under lockdowns. But what will this disease be, and how well (or badly) prepared are we to cope? These questions are currently worrying health experts here and around the world.

A recent survey of more than 100 leading infectious-disease scientists into the 'state of pandemic preparedness' warned that the next global plague will most likely be an infection that humans have never encountered before. It will likely be caused by a 'pathogen that is highly transmissible' for which we have 'no tests, treatments or vaccines', concluded the report by the Abbott Pandemic Defence Coalition, an international scientific organisation that monitors infectious disease threats.

Meanwhile, a separate report by 200 scientists for the World Health Organisation (WHO) pictures a different scenario. Last year, they compiled a list of the top 30 potential threats and concluded that Disease X could prove to be a deadly foe that we already know – but which suddenly gains devastating new infectious powers.

Their list is led by viruses that originated in animals – flu (from birds), monkeypox (primates), dengue and West Nile virus (mosquitoes) and Lassa fever (rodents). The WHO experts also fear a lethal plague escaping from a lab, as many suspect happened with Covid-19 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Such fears are starkly recognised by the ongoing UK Covid-19 Inquiry, set up to examine our response to, and impact from, the pandemic and learn lessons for the future. Opening its first report, published in July 2024, the inquiry chair Baroness Hallett wrote: 'It is not a question of 'if' another pandemic will strike but 'when'.

'Another pandemic – potentially even more transmissible and lethal – is likely to occur in the near to medium future,' she warned, urging that 'lessons be learned and fundamental change implemented.' But is anyone in power taking such warnings seriously? Just last month, Dame Kate Bingham, who led the Government's vaccine taskforce between May and December 2020, warned that Whitehall remains unready to tackle further contagions in a practical way.

She told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry that instead of tackling practical matters, staff are 'busy writing policy papers and sending each other stuff to review'. This is a view echoed by leading UK scientists, who warn that our nation remains perilously unprepared for the next pandemic – with little sign of adequate real-world defences against contagion being introduced – and some even being dismantled.

'Britain is guilty of reverting to its complacent habits,' Stephen Griffin, a professor of virology at the University of Leeds, told Good Health. 'There is definitely an impression that we have decided that the next pandemic won't be for 100 years, so let's just kick this issue down the road.'

As stark evidence, he says the UK has stopped trying to stockpile drugs such as vaccines and antivirals in readiness for fighting emerging pandemic infections. 'We now have a very bare cupboard where antivirals are concerned – it's a desperate situation,' he says. 'We should be investing in developing vaccines and therapeutic drugs.

But this has all been scaled back to the level that it was before Covid-19.' Professor Griffin is particularly critical of the Government's sale of the UK Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre in 2022, after the UK's final Covid-19 lockdown ended. The centre in Oxfordshire had been launched in 2017 as a not-for-profit company that would combine vaccine research and manufacturing.

It was sold to US-based pharma company Catalent in the hope of attracting new investment to the facility – yet Catalent has said it's put all work on hold, prompting fears about the woeful inadequacy of Britain's future vaccine-manufacturing abilities.

Meanwhile, serious supply problems appear still to be dogging supplies of PPE – with shortages of vital stocks such as gloves and masks afflicting NHS hospitals in the face of this winter's wave of respiratory infections. In January, the NHS Supply Chain agency sent a series of bulletins to hospitals warning: 'The NHS is facing increased demand for PPE products due to rising cases of respiratory viral infections, including RSV, influenza and Covid.'

The agency warned that a number of specific types of protective gloves and masks were either no longer available or were in restricted supply. On top of apparent shortages of PPE stocks and the loss of a world-leading vaccine-development centre, Professor Griffin warns that Britain is also failing to install new-generation ventilation and filtering systems in our office buildings and public transport.

'Most pandemics will be an airborne respiratory virus – because that's the fastest and easiest way a virus can spread through populations,' he says. 'If we had improved ventilation systems, it would stop that transmission. That would bring us up to the standards seen in East Asian countries (such as Japan and Taiwan), where such nations did not have to introduce such extreme measures as lockdowns because they had these filtration systems in place

.' Britain also needs to start investing in new equipment for testing people for infection and monitoring the spread that could be mobilised in an emergency, adds Professor Griffin. Rolled out by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) in summer 2020, this tested sewage for evidence of Covid-19 infection – meaning public-health bosses could be warned of outbreaks, as the virus sheds tiny fragments of its DNA in people's poo, even if they have no symptoms.

This DNA can be detected in sewage weeks before surging infection rates indicate a local outbreak is already under way. But instead of building on the scheme's success, in 2022 the UKHSA quietly scrapped wastewater Covid surveillance in England. This is the opposite of what experts such as Professor Griffin desperately want to see. He says: 'We need to have broader surveillance of how infections are breaking out and spreading.

'If we have this surveillance, along with clean air, public virus-testing, new vaccine designs and drug therapies, we will be so much better prepared that we will not have to impose the harsh lockdowns we saw last time.' Professor Adam Kucharski, co-director of the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says Britain should copy other countries' successful strategies.

Source: dailymail.