https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.15212/ZOONOSES-2025-0015
Announcing a new article publication for
Zoonoses journal. In past decades, numerous emerging infectious diseases have markedly affected global health and social-economic development. Consequently, the concept of “disease X” has been developed and lists of the pathogens with potential to cause future pandemics have been proposed and updated several times by the World Health Organization. This article analyses the major features of pathogens with high probability to cause future COVID-19-like pandemics, on the basis of their transmission routes, animal-human interfaces, herd immunity barriers, and evolutionary and mutational characteristics. High-priority viral infectious diseases with potential to become disease X in the future, are also evaluated on the basis of their transmission pathways, including airborne/respiratory, vector-borne, and direct contact. Overall, viruses had much greater likelihood of becoming “pathogen X” than either bacteria or other microorganisms.
Respiratory viruses, particularly RNA viruses, have notably high potential to become pathogen X. Vector-borne viruses might also become pathogen X, and mosquito-borne viruses would be more likely than tick-borne viruses to do so. Many contagious viral infectious diseases lead to severe clinical outcomes but have relatively low likelihood of causing global pandemics. Coronaviruses in the
Coronaviridae and influenza viruses in the
Orthomyxoviridae were identified as top-priority pathogens X with potential to cause the next COVID pandemic.
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Zoonoses is fully open access journal for research scientists, physicians, veterinarians, and public health professionals working on diverse disciplinaries of zoonotic diseases. Please visit
https://zoonoses-journal.org/ to learn more about the journal.
Zoonoses is now open for submissions; articles can be submitted online at
https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/zoonoses
There are no author submission or article processing fees.
Editorial Board: https://zoonoses-journal.org/index.php/editorial-board/
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https://www.scienceopen.com/search#collection/839df240-327f-47dd-b636-9b728dff9700).
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eISSN 2737-7474
ISSN 2737-7466
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Qi Shi and Xiaoping Dong. High-Priority Pathogens with Potential to Cause “Disease X” Pandemics.
Zoonoses. 2025. Vol. 5(1). DOI: 10.15212/ZOONOSES-2025-0015