Subscribe
Threats of a new global pandemic become more realistic with climate change. There are now greater chances of emergence of new diseases as pathogens hidden beneath ice for centuries are uncovered and inter-species interactions grow with rapid land-use change.
In fact, the world may be hit by another pandemic as early as by 2030 due to one of these emerging zoonotic diseases, the United Nations Environment Programme warned in July 2024.
New viruses are likely to the culprits, according to experts surveyed by the Abbott Pandemic Defense Coalition. Mosquitoes may be the vessels that spread the pandemic-causing pathogen. The report also highlighted the role of climatic factors in making future pandemics a reality. "More than 80 per cent of experts rated expanding or changing range due to climate change as factors that could make outbreaks more frequent or severe. About 59 per cent noted that extreme storms that cause flooding, tsunamis, and hurricanes could make outbreaks more frequent or severe."
In 2024, known pathogens infected new species in new places and also evolved to acquire newer transmission routes.
The highly infectious avian influenza strain H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b that had reached the sub-Antarctic region by the end of 2023 killed penguins for the first time in January 2024.
By March 2024, the pathogen reached mainland Antarctica, posing a serious threats to the region's penguins. It infected skuas and albatross, among wild species.
Around the same time, a relatively new virus discovered in 2015 claimed its first human life. In January 2024, an elderly Alaskan man died of Alaskapox, belonging to the same family as smallpox, cowpox and mpox.
This was also when Obelisk, a new virus-like entity was discovered, although it is not known if it causes any harm to humans.
During the early months of 2024, through August, there was a rise in COVID-19 cases worldwide, with new waves of infections recorded in the United States, Europe and Western Pacific region.
Several states in India, including Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Rajasthan and West Bengal, also reported a positivity rate of over five per cent.
By September, it became clear that a new COVID-19 variant, XEC, was doing the rounds and had already reached 27 countries. The variant, first detected in Germany, was a sublineage of the omicron variant and a hybrid of KS.1.1 and KP.3.3 sub-variants.
The scientists believe that XEC has a set of mutations that can make it more contagious than those that have propped up in the aftermath of the second wave of the pandemic which involved the delta variant.
The outbreak of mpox, previously known as monkeypox, in Africa was declared a public health emergency of international concern in August 2024, the second time in two years. The upsurge was driven by a new strain of the virus, Clade 1b, that was first isolated in 2023.
Through the new variety, the virus showed signs of 'microevolution', and also changed the way it spreads and the population groups it affects.
On September 23, 2024, the strain was also reported in India in a 38-year-old man who had returned to Kerala’s Malappuram from Dubai.
Like it began, the year also ended with reports of the H5N1 virus evolving, with a new virus showing greater possibility of becoming air-borne. The strain extracted from polecat, mink and an infected Texas-based dairy worker in the United States, however, showed a low infectious rate.
In November, a Canadian teen was also reported to be severely ill with bird flu. The strain that he contracted was different from that affecting poultry in the province and showed mutations that would make it easier to infect people.
In December, scientists found that the H5N1 avian influenza virus was just one mutation away from human-to-human transmission, according to a report published in the journal Science.
The same month it was reported that a mysterious disease killed 67-143 people in two weeks in the south-western corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Patients reported flu-like symptoms of fever, headache, cough and anaemia.
Finally, a study by the Pasteur Institute showed that a highly drug-resistant cholera strain has spread from "Yemen to France". The strain resistant to 10 antibiotics was identified for the first time in Yemen during the cholera outbreak in 2018–2019, according to the report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.