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WHO says Nipah virus can be a potential epidemic in future. The outbreak of Nipah virus recognized in Bangladesh in 2004 was said to be caused by consuming date palm sap that was exposed to Nipah virus infected fruit bats. Nipah virus outbreaks were noticed in Kerala in India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, and eastern Australia. The recent death of three members in the Nipah virus affected family in Kerala made the Kerala State Health Department to put the state on high alert. The nature of Nipah virus has not been ascertained so far. <br /><br /><strong>Symptoms and signs of Nipah virus infection in humans</strong><br /><br />Human beings infected with Nipah virus can show up asymptomatic infection or acute respiratory infection ranging from mild to severe states in addition to encephalitis that can prove fatal. Some of the symptoms developed by persons infected with Nipah virus include headaches, fevers, muscle pain, sore throat and vomiting. They might also feel drowsiness, altered consciousness, and some neurological conditions like acute encephalitis or brain inflammation. In some affected individuals, Nipah virus can lead to severe kind of respiratory problems and acute respiratory distress.<br /><br />In some other serious cases of Nipah virus infection, the individuals might experience severe respiratory difficulties, atypical pneumonia, and seizures. Such conditions can also progress to the level of coma within a period of 24 to 48 hours. Convulsions and pulmonary signs can also be noticed in some infected persons. <br /><br />The incubation period of this virus is found to be between 4 to 14 days and in some cases, this can even drag on for as long as 45 days. <br /><br />The symptoms of Nipah virus are often confused with Japanese encephalitis. The outbreak of Nipah virus in Malaysia led to the death of more than 50% of the cases infected with Nipah virus. <br /><br /><strong>How to treat Nipah virus</strong><br /><br />As on date, there are no drugs or vaccines available with us to treat Nipah virus infection. In fact, the WHO has identified Nipah virus as a priority disease for their Research and Development. Severe cases of Nipah virus infections are to be treated to prevent severe respiratory disorders and neurological complications including seizures. <br /><br />Since the vaccine to treat this deadly virus is absent today, prevention is the best way to stop the infection and spread of Nipah virus. Appropriate detergents must be used for a thorough cleaning of the infected pigs if any instances of Nipah virus outbreak is noted in animals, the farm must be immediately quarantined. In order to reduce the risk of Nipah virus outbreak the WHO suggests culling of infected animals, burial or incineration of the carcasses such steps can minimize the risk of transmission of Nipah virus to people. <br /><br /><strong>Nipha virus Treatment</strong><br /><br />Treatment of Nipah virus is highly limited. Only supportive care can be given to the infected persons. There is no specific treatment plan available to the medical industry today. Extreme precautions are necessary for the healthcare workers dealing with Nipah virus infected persons and while handling the laboratory samples.<br />

All you need to know about Nipah Virus Symptoms and Treatment

A zoonotic virus meaning that which is transmitted from animals to humans, Nipah virus can also be passed on from one human to another through direct contact or through contaminated food. When Nipah virus infects people, it can cause a range of illnesses in infected persons. These symptoms can range from asymptomatic infection to acute respiratory difficulties and encephalitis that can be fatal. This virus is also found to cause severe diseases in animals which would bring about big economic losses for those in farming. <br /><br />There have been only a few known Nipah virus outbreaks in Asia. However, the fact that this virus infects a wide range of animals and causes severe illnesses and deaths to humans is a matter of big concern.<br /><br /><strong><keyword id="6546549" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="nipah-virus-history">Nipah virus history</keyword></strong><br /><br />For the first time, Nipah virus was recognized in 1999 in pig farms located in Malaysia. Since 1999, there had not been other instances of Nipah virus outbreaks in Malaysia. <br /><br />In Bangladesh, Nipah virus was recognized for the first time in 2001. Since then, there had been annual occurrences of Nipah virus outbreaks in that country. Periodical outbreaks of Nipah virus has been noted in eastern India also. <br /><br />The bat species called as Pteropus have been identified as the natural reservoirs for Nipah virus. These species of bats are known to inhabit countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Ghana, Madagascar, and the Philippines. Hence these countries are said to be in the zones carrying a high risk of Nipah virus outbreaks.<br /><br /><strong>Nipah virus and domestic animals</strong><br /><br />In 1999, Nipah virus outbreak was noted in pigs and other domestic animals like sheep, goats, cats, dogs and horses. In the case of pigs, this virus is highly contagious. Pigs carrying Nipah virus are found to be highly infectious during the incubation period. This can last from 4 to 14 days. If pigs are noticed with unusual kind of barking cough or spotted with human cases of encephalitis, Nipah virus can be suspected. If this happens, serious measures must be taken to stop the spread of this deadly virus.<br /><br /><strong>Why is Nipah virus highly concerning?</strong><br /><br />The fatality rate of Nipah virus infection is found to be 40% to 75%. This rate can, however, differ depending on the capabilities of the medical facilities available locally to treat the affected patients. About 20% of the patients who get out of Nipah virus infections remain with residual neurological effects like personality changes and seizure complaints. <br /><br /><strong>How WHO respond to Nipah virus?</strong><br /><br />WHO has been taking several serious measures to stop the outbreak and spread of Nipah virus besides exploring ways to treat the Nipah virus affected people. <br /><br />WHO advice regarding the prevention of Nipah virus outbreak. There is a high risk of transmission of Nipah virus through the medium of fruits and fruit products like raw date palm juices contaminated with the saliva or urine of the infected fruit bats. This can be prevented by washing these products thoroughly before consumption. The other methods of preventing the Nipah virus spread is by peeling off these fruits and discarding the fruits that carry the signs of bat bites.<br />

What Is Nipah Virus, causes, history and everything you should know

<strong><br /></strong><ul><li><strong>The southern state of <keyword id="28504" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Kerala">Kerala</keyword> has been hit by the <keyword id="6544034" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="nipah-virus">Nipah virus</keyword>.</strong></li><li><strong>There have been nine deaths in Kerala’s Kozhikode due to high fever, and at least three have been caused by the virus.<br /></strong></li><li><strong>The <keyword id="83655" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Union-health-ministry">Union Health Ministry</keyword> has sent a team to assist virus hit regions in Kerala.</strong></li></ul><keyword id="6545212" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="nipah">Nipah</keyword> is on the <keyword id="43588" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="World-Health-Organization">World Health Organization</keyword>'s list of viruses most likely to cause a global pandemic. It's the virus that inspired the 2011 movie <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sYSyuuLk5g">Contagion</a>. And just this past January, governments and philanthropists <a href="http://cepi.net/cepi-officially-launched">pledged</a> hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a Nipah vaccine because it poses such a big threat.<br /><br />The Nipah virus, one of the most deadly viruses on the World Health Organization list, has hit Kerala. The state health department has confirmed three deaths to be caused by Nipah virus in Kerala’s Kozhikode. At least nine people in Kozhikode died due to high fever, says a <a href="http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/kerala-9-die-due-to-high-fever-2-affected-with-nipah-virus-118052100239_1.html">report</a>. <br /><strong><br />What is Nipah virus? How does it spread? </strong><br /><br />The Nipah virus is carried by fruit <keyword id="92255" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Bats">bats</keyword>, of the Pteropodidae family,<em> Pteropus genus</em>, and was first identified during an outbreak in Kampung Sungai Nipah in <keyword id="8695" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Malaysia">Malaysia</keyword> in 1998. The virus can cause diseases to human beings and animals. The disease can be transmitted both from animal-human and human-human contact.<br /><br />The virus can spread to humans through food contaminated by bat saliva or urine. India has had two reported outbreaks of Nipah virus, both the times in <keyword id="6357783" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="West-bengal">West Bengal</keyword>, once in 2001 and then in 2007. The total death toll during the outbreaks was fifty of the seventy-one reported cases. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the fatality rate of the virus is <a href="http://www.searo.who.int/entity/emerging_diseases/links/nipah_virus_outbreaks_sear/en/">75%</a> on an average.<br /><br /><strong>Symptoms of Nipah virus-affected patients:</strong><br /><br />After the exposure, the virus has an incubation period of 5-14 days. <br />Here are the symptoms of Nipah virus-affected patients: <br /><br /><ul><li>3-14 days of fever</li><li>Drowsiness</li><li>Disorientation and mental confusion</li><li>Respiratory illness</li></ul><strong>Long-term effects of Nipah virus on affected humans:</strong><br /><br /><ul><li>Inflammation of the brain</li><li>Nervous diseases</li><li>Persistent convulsions and personality changes.</li><li>Latent infection and reactivation of Nipah virus.</li></ul><strong><br />Prevention</strong><br /><br />The only way of prevention is to stay away from infected animals and not to eat fruits that have fallen to the ground as they might have been infected by the virus.<br /><br /><strong>Cure and Treatments<br /></strong><br />The virus, as of now, does not have a cure. The primary treatment for humans is intensive care.<br /><br /><strong>Nipah virus in Kerala<br /></strong><br />With the confirmation of Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala, and it leading to three deaths in Kozhikode, the Union Health Ministry has sent a team of experts to assist the state. In the past, the outbreaks were caused due to the disease transmission due to contacts from infected bats, pigs and people.<br /><br />Out of the three victims of Nipah virus, two are men and the third is a woman. The two men were brothers and the woman, a relative who visited them in hospital, said a report on <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/3-dead-from-mysterious-nipah-virus-in-kerala-centre-sends-team-10-points-1854897">NDTV</a>.<br /><br />People suspected to be affected by the virus are currently being monitored at the Kozhikode Medical College and a few other hospitals. <br />

A rare virus carried by fruit bats may have just started to spread in India

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>REUTERS/Sukree Sukplang</span></p><p class="caption">Fruit bats are the natural hosts for the virus.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul><li><strong>At least nine people have reportedly died and 25 more have been infected in an outbreak of the Nipah virus in India. </strong></li><li><strong>Nipah is a deadly virus that can be transmitted between people. It has killed between 40% and 75% of infected people in past outbreaks.</strong></li><li><strong>Fruit bats are the natural host of the disease, and t</strong><strong>here is no cure or vaccine.</strong></li></ul><p><br />At least nine people in southern India have died in cases linked to an outbreak of the rare and extremely deadly Nipah virus, according to a <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44193145">report by the BBC</a>.</p><p>Nipah is considered a newly emerging deadly virus - scientists only found out that it could jump from bats to other species, including humans, within the past 20 years. The disease is currently incurable and can be transmitted from person to person. It has killed between 40% and 75% of infected people in most outbreaks.</p><p>These statistics indicate that Nipah has the potential to cause a deadly pandemic, which is why the World Health Organization <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/disease-x-who-lists-mystery-disease-as-potential-next-pandemic-2018-3">lists Nipah as an urgent research priority</a>, alongside <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warns-of-deadly-disease-pandemic-2018-5#disease-x-7">diseases like Ebola and SARS</a>.</p><p>Of the nine people who have died so far in the city of Kozhikode in Kerala, three cases of Nipah have been confirmed. Results from the other six are still being tested, and at least 25 more people have been hospitalized.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>AP Photo/Rob Griffith</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><h2>A little-known virus</h2><p>Nipah <a href="http://www.who.int/csr/disease/nipah/en/">first appeared in Malaysia</a> in 1998, when 265 people became infected with a strange illness that caused encephalitis, or brain inflammation, after they came into contact with pigs or sick people. In that outbreak, <a href="http://www.searo.who.int/entity/emerging_diseases/links/CDS_Nipah_Virus.pdf?ua=1">105 people died</a>, a fatality rate of 40%.</p><p>Since then, there have been a number of smaller outbreaks in India and Bangladesh, with about 280 infections and 211 deaths - <a href="http://www.searo.who.int/entity/emerging_diseases/links/nipah_virus_outbreaks_sear/en/">an average fatality rate</a> of 75%.</p><p>When the first infections jumped from pigs to humans, authorities killed more than a million pigs to try to stop the spread of the disease. Since then, however, researchers have identified several fruit bat species as the natural hosts of the virus. In some cases, humans have been infected after drinking sap from date palms that bats may have contaminated.</p><p>The BBC reported that in the most recent outbreak, mangoes bitten by bats were found in a home where three of the deceased patients lived.</p><p>Symptoms for Nipah have varied <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/nipah/symptoms/index.html">depending on the outbreak</a>. Many patients first experienced fever and headache, followed by drowsiness and confusion. Some patients have also shown respiratory flu-like symptoms while infected. In other cases, symptoms progressed to a coma within a day or two. </p><p>People who survive the initial infection can have lasting health issues, including personality changes and persistent convulsions. In some cases, the virus has re-activated in patients months or years after exposure, causing illness and death.</p><p>Close contact with sick animals or people can spread the disease - in the current outbreak, at least one of the deceased people was a nurse who treated sick patients. <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/11/1743/344101">A study of Nipah virus transmission</a> suggested that infected patients' saliva is likely to spread the infection.</p><p>For now, the priority is to identify the remaining Nipah cases to ensure the disease doesn't continue to spread.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/octopus-weirdest-animals-rna-editing-super-powers-2018-5">Octopuses are officially the weirdest animals on Earth</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

A little-known, rare, and extremely deadly virus has emerged and killed people in India - here's what to know about Nipah virus

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Researchers have identified a virus that jumped from animals to humans in China.</li><li>A total of 35 human infections were recorded over two and a half years.</li></ul><p>Scientists in China have identified a virus that has infected humans for the first time, but the disease is unlikely to spread from person to person, based on the current evidence. </p><p>The first person to fall ill with the newfound Langya henipavirus, or LayV, was a woman in Shandong province in late 2018, according to a peer-reviewed correspondence published in the <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2202705">New England Journal of Medicine</a>.</p><p>The patient was a farmer with a history of animal exposure, so health officials suspected a possibility of disease spillover from an animal host. Testing later revealed that the virus was previously unseen in humans and may have originated in shrews.</p><p>The woman's symptoms included fever, headache, muscle aches, fatigue, cough, and nausea, according to the report. Thirty-four more people — primarily farmers in Shandong and the neighboring Henan province — reported similar symptoms and tested positive for LayV between December 2018 and May 2021.</p><p>Based on the information available, Langya virus poses a very low risk to the general population, infectious disease doctor Monica Gandhi told Insider. No one has died of Langya virus infection to date, and researchers have not found any evidence of human-to-human transmission.</p><p>"People should not be frightened about this spreading," said Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco who was not associated with the NEJM report. "I think everyone is hyper-alert to new viruses, but I don't think this one is going to be a major threat." </p><h2><strong>The virus was detected in wild shrews</strong></h2><p>Researchers tested 25 small wild animal species for the Langya virus and found it was "predominantly detected" in shrews, according to the report. The authors concluded that the small, mole-like mammals may be a natural host for the virus.</p><p>However, the connection between humans and shrews remains to be investigated, Gandhi said. It is not yet clear if something changed to push humans closer to shrews, or vice versa, or if another animal may be involved in the chain of transmission.</p><p>Humans appear to be a dead end for the virus, but researchers said their sample was too small to be certain. They examined close contacts of nine patients infected with LayV and found no evidence of human-to-human transmission, and the people who got sick reported no common sources of exposure.</p><h2><strong>Related viruses have caused small outbreaks with some fatalities</strong></h2><p>The Langya virus is related to — but genetically distinct from — the Nipah and Hendra viruses, which have both caused fatal infections in humans. However, people who got sick with Langya virus had milder symptoms in comparison, Gandhi noted.</p><p>All of the 26 patients found to be infected with LayV alone reported fevers. About half of them experienced fatigue, decreased white blood cell count, and cough. A few people experienced more severe symptoms, such as impaired kidney and liver function.</p><p>People infected with previous henipaviruses in the past experienced similar fevers and flu-like symptoms, often with signs of respiratory illness. Fatality rates for Nipah and Hendra viruses range <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/nipah/about/index.html">between 40 and 70%,</a> according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p><p>Still, Nipah and Hendra viruses have caused relatively small outbreaks compared to COVID-19 — only seven human cases of <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/hendra/index.html">Hendra virus</a> have been reported since 1994, and <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/nipah/about/index.html">Nipah virus</a> infected some 300 people across Malaysia and Singapore in 1999.</p><h2>'We're in a different age now'</h2><p>Another key difference is that scientists today are better prepared to identify new viruses and make vaccines if necessary, Gandhi said.</p><p>"We're in a different age now, where I hope that we never have to go through what we went through with SARS-CoV-2, and where we can control things better," she said.</p>

A new virus in China sparked panic after jumping from shrews to humans, but experts say it probably isn't as concerning as COVID. Here's why.

<strong>What Is Chamki Fever/Acute Encephalitis Syndrome<br /></strong><br />Chamki fever or encephalitis is an inflammatory condition of the brain resulting in a variety of associated symptoms. Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) causes an acute-onset of fever associated with headache and most commonly reported in children and young adults. This illness brings about an alarming rate of morbidity and mortality. The recent outbreak of chamki fever in Bihar resulted in over 100 deaths in Muzaffarpur and its adjoining regions in the state of Bihar, India. Most notably, the similar outbreak of chamki fever resulted in about 700 deaths in 2014. Predominantly, chamki fever affects children and young adults in the age group of 1 to 10. The name chamki bukhar means fever condition associated with a seizure. Reports say that chamki fever or AES has spread in over 12 districts of Bihar including Muzaffarpur, Vaishali and East Champaran with Muzaffarpur declared as the worst hit zone. <br /><br /><strong>What is Chamki Fever or Acute Encephalitis Syndrome<br /></strong><br />Acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) or chamki fever is a highly serious public health problem in India. It manifests as an acute onset of fever and a seriously affected mental condition resulting in confusion, disorientation, delirium, or coma. The affected individual may experience seizures. Chamki fever can happen in any age and at any time of the year. <br /><br />Muzaffarpur, Bihar and adjoining areas in Bihar are litchi producing districts. This disease mostly spreads far and wide in the months between April and June especially in children who are undernourished with a history of consuming litchis from the neighboring orchards.<br /><br /><strong>Causes of Chamki fever or Acute Encephalitis Syndrome<br /></strong><br />Viruses are said to be the main agents causing AES. However, other sources like bacteria, fungus, chemicals, parasites, spirochetes, toxins, and some noninfectious agents have also been noted to cause chamki fever as studied over the past few decades. <br /><br />Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) is identified as the major cause of AES in India. The percentage of this agent ranges from 5-35 percent. Nipah virus and Zika virus are also said to be AES causing agents. In some cases. <br /><br />The other agents causing chamki fever include Influenza A virus, simplex virus, mumps, dengue, West Parvovirus B4, Nile virus, Epstein-Barr virus Chandipura virus, measles, enteroviruses, scrub typhus, and S pneumonia.<br /><br /><strong>Symptoms of chamki fever or Encephalitis<br /></strong><br />Some of the prominent and most common symptoms of chamki fever include High temperature, Headache, extreme sensitivity to light, stiff neck and back, nausea, and mental confusion. In severe cases of chamki fever, seizures and paralysis can result. <br /><br /><strong>Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV)<br /></strong><br />As discussed so far, JEV is identified as the major cause of AES in India. This virus is spread by mosquitos and it is a kind of flavivirus. This virus belongs to the same genus like dengue, yellow fever, and West Nile viruses. <br /><br />So far no cure has been discovered for chamki fever. The treatment available now focuses mainly on relieving the severe clinical symptoms found in the affected persons and supporting the patients to overcome the infective condition. <br /><br /><strong>Treatment for chamki fever or Encephalitis<br /></strong><br />The affected persons must be treated immediately to avoid severe complications. The patients must be admitted to the Intensive Care unit or ICU to prevent any kinds of major mishaps.<br /><br />Chamki fever can be treated with anti-inflammatory drugs including Acetaminophen, Ibuprofen and Naproxen Sodium which can bring down the temperature and headache.<br /><br />Majority of cases reported with chamki fever can get resolved in a matter of a few days. However, some severe cases can take about a few weeks to recover.<br />

What Is Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (Chamki Fever) - All you need to know

<ul class="summary-list"><li><keyword id="7720960" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Robert-Redfield">Robert Redfield</keyword>, who led the <keyword id="6379474" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="cdc">CDC</keyword> under Trump, said he thinks the <keyword id="1754604" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="coronavirus">coronavirus</keyword> escaped from a Wuhan lab.</li><li>"It's not unusual" for pathogens being studied in a lab to infect workers, he <a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-updates-03-26-21/h_8dc361e9c4b8fc77d03d3862eacbd9d6">told CNN</a>.</li><li>After a month-long investigation in Wuhan, the WHO concluded a lab leak was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-investigation-concludes-coronavirus-did-not-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-2">"extremely unlikely."</a></li></ul><p>More than a year into the pandemic, the origins of the coronavirus remain a mystery.</p><p>That uncertainty leaves a door open for unsubstantiated, and sometimes controversial, theories. The latest figure to perpetuate one of these unlikely ideas: Robert Redfield, who served as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Donald Trump.</p><p>Redfield <a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-updates-03-26-21/h_8dc361e9c4b8fc77d03d3862eacbd9d6">told CNN</a> in an interview clip that aired Friday that he believes the virus "escaped" from a laboratory in Wuhan. Other members of the Trump administration also pushed this theory last year.</p><p>"It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker," Redfield told <keyword id="82130" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="CNN">CNN</keyword>, adding, "that's not implying any intentionality."</p><p>The former CDC head, who "spent his life in virology," emphasized, though, that this is simply his opinion. </p><p>"Other people don't believe that. That's fine. <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword> will eventually figure it out," Redfield said, adding, "I'm allowed to have opinions now."</p><p>A recent USA Today <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">opinion piece</a> articulated a similar idea, stating that lab leaks in the US aren't terribly uncommon, so a laboratory origin for the pandemic shouldn't be ruled out.</p><p>But to date, there's no scientific evidence that the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. Even after a month-long investigation into the virus' origins in Wuhan, the World <keyword id="6354750" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="health">Health</keyword> Organization concluded that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely." </p><h2>Why the lab leak theory doesn't hold water</h2><div type="image" title="wuhan institute of virology" height="1125" width="2000" msid="81712901" hostid="261"></div><p>Conspiracy theories about a Wuhan lab leak often involve <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-coronavirus-did-not-leak-from-wuhan-lab-researcher-2020-4">the Wuhan Institute of Virology</a>, where some scientists were studying coronaviruses prior to the pandemic. The lab is about 8 miles from a wet market linked to some of Wuhan's earliest cases. </p><p>But the <a href="https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus">international WHO team</a> that spent a month in Wuhan spoke with managers and staff at the institute about their safety protocols. It's one of the highest-level biosafety labs in the world.</p><p>"Accidents do happen - we have many examples in many countries in the world of past accidents," Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO scientist specializing in food safety and animal disease, said in a February press conference. But in this case, he said, the Wuhan the institute houses a "state-of-the-art lab," so it is "very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place."</p><p>Jonna Mazet, a US epidemiologist who has worked with and trained researchers at the institute, also <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-coronavirus-did-not-leak-from-wuhan-lab-researcher-2020-4">previously told Insider</a> that she thinks "it's highly unlikely this was a lab accident."</p><p>Mazet said she helped the staff develop and implement a "very stringent safety protocol."</p><div type="image" title="WHO wuhan" height="2645" width="3968" msid="81712905" hostid="261"></div><p>In fact, the WHO team found no evidence that samples of the novel coronavirus existed in any Wuhan labs, or any other labs in the world, before the pandemic.</p><p>Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan institute, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/">told Scientific American</a> in April 2020 that she personally checked the coronavirus samples stored at the lab, and found that none matched the new coronavirus' genome.</p><p>"That really took a load off my mind," Shi <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/">said</a>. "I had not slept a wink for days."</p><h2>Evidence suggests the virus jumped from animals to people</h2><div type="image" title="wuhan huanan market" height="2333" width="3500" msid="81712906" hostid="261"></div><p>Redfield <a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-updates-03-26-21/h_8dc361e9c4b8fc77d03d3862eacbd9d6">told CNN</a> that he does not believe the novel coronavirus jumped from a bat to a human.</p><p>According to the WHO team, it is indeed unlikely the virus hopped directly from bats to people. Rather, the most likely explanation is that the coronavirus came into our population via an intermediary animal host, perhaps a pangolin, rabbit, or ferret. One WHO team member suggested <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/977527808/who-points-to-wildlife-farms-in-southwest-china-as-likely-source-of-pandemic">wildlife farms in southern China</a> were the likely origin point.</p><p>Bats are common virus hosts: Cross-species hops from bat populations also led to the outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, and the Nipah virus. </p><p><a href="https://nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7">One study</a> from February 2020 found that the new coronavirus shares 96% of its genetic code with a coronavirus seen in Chinese bat populations. <a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)30662-X">Another 2020 study</a> revealed an even closer match: a 97.1% similarity to a coronavirus called RmYN02, which was found in bats in China's Yunnan province between May and October 2019.</p><h2>Spreading 'below the radar' in late 2019</h2><div type="image" title="china wuhan" height="2670" width="4000" msid="81712909" hostid="261"></div><p>Redfield said the coronavirus' highly infectious nature in humans would make "no biological sense" if it came from an animal.</p><p>"I do not believe that this somehow came from a bat to a human, and at that moment in time that the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission," he told CNN. Redfield added that it normally takes a while for a virus "to figure out how to become more and more efficient."</p><p>So he suggested that the virus could have improved its ability to infect people in a lab where people were working on it: "Most of us in a lab,when we're trying to grow a virus, we're trying to make it grow better," Redfield said.</p><p>But according to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it's more likely that the virus became more efficient at invading human hosts while spreading undetected in China in late 2019.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6vku1PzLd0">In a Friday White House briefing</a>, Fauci said research indicates the coronavirus was spreading "below the radar screen" in China for several weeks, or perhaps a month or more, before the first cases were reported. That allowed the virus "to be pretty well adapted when first recognized," Fauci added. </p><p>Redfield also thinks the coronavirus was circulating months before Chinese authorities reported the first cases to the WHO.</p><p>"If I was to guess, this virus started transmitting somewhere in September, October in Wuhan," <a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-updates-03-26-21/h_8dc361e9c4b8fc77d03d3862eacbd9d6">he told CNN</a>.</p><p>Chinese government records show the country's first coronavirus case was documented on November 17, 2019, according <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back">to the South China Morning Post</a>. Findings from the WHO investigation, meanwhile, show that more than 90 patients in the Hubei province - where Wuhan is located -  were hospitalized with pneumonia or coronavirus-like symptoms in October and November 2019.</p>

Trump's CDC director is perpetuating baseless claims that the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan lab

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The idea the <keyword id="1754604" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="coronavirus">coronavirus</keyword> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield-coronavirus-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-3">leaked from a lab</a> hasn't been <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lab-leak-viable-theory-coronavirus-origin-scientists-say-2021-5">disproved</a>, though a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-investigation-concludes-coronavirus-did-not-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-2">WHO report</a> said it was unlikely.</li><li>The virus probably jumped to people from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-coronavirus-likely-jumped-animals-wildlife-farms-2021-3">animals</a>. Biden gave US officials <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-administration-officials-call-probe-coronavirus-origins-2021-5">90 days</a> to assess both ideas.</li><li>Here's a breakdown of the evidence in favor of a lab leak and a natural spillover from animals.</li></ul><p>It's the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/theory-coronavirus-accidentally-leaked-chinese-lab-2020-4">theory</a> that refuses to die: Might the coronavirus have leaked out of a Chinese lab?</p><p>As long as the mystery of the pandemic's origin remains unsolved, the question will persist. Increasingly, global leaders are calling for more thorough investigations into the possibility.</p><p>That group includes President <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-administration-officials-call-probe-coronavirus-origins-2021-5">Joe Biden</a>, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-wuhan-scientists-initially-worried-coronavirus-leaked-lab-2021-3">Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus</a>, the director-general of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-investigation-concludes-coronavirus-did-not-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-2">World Health Organization</a>.</p><p>Though a month-long WHO <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-investigation-concludes-coronavirus-did-not-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-2">investigation</a> in the city of Wuhan concluded that the coronavirus most likely spilled over to people from animals - possibly at <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-coronavirus-likely-jumped-animals-wildlife-farms-2021-3">wildlife farms</a> - the group found no definitive proof of that. Nor could it rule out a lab leak. </p><p>So Tedros said in March that he did "<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-wuhan-scientists-initially-worried-coronavirus-leaked-lab-2021-3">not believe that this assessment was extensive enough</a>."</p><p>Fauci, meanwhile, said <a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/dr-fauci-cdc-director-testify-before-senate-on-covid-19-guidelines-transcript">during a Senate hearing</a> this month that the "possibility certainly exists" that the pandemic started because of a lab accident. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/24/gottlieb-says-theres-growing-circumstantial-evidence-that-covid-may-have-originated-in-a-lab.html">Scott Gottlieb</a>, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, has also said there is some circumstantial evidence favoring a lab leak, as has <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield-coronavirus-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-3">Robert Redfield</a>, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p><p>In a Wednesday press conference, Biden gave the US intelligence community <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-administration-officials-call-probe-coronavirus-origins-2021-5">90 days</a> to collect and analyze evidence supporting each of the two scenarios, in the hopes of reaching a "definitive conclusion" on the coronavirus' origin.</p><p>Here's what to know about each theory - a lab leak and a natural spillover from animals - and the key pieces of evidence supporting each.</p><h2>The lab-leak hypothesis</h2><p>Eighteen scientists from the US, the UK, Canada, and Switzerland recently <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lab-leak-viable-theory-coronavirus-origin-scientists-say-2021-5">published a letter</a> saying they thought the lab-leak theory remained viable.</p><p>Questions about a such a leak generally center on <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-coronavirus-did-not-leak-from-wuhan-lab-researcher-2020-4">the Wuhan Institute of Virology</a>, a high-level biosafety lab where some scientists had been studying coronaviruses before the pandemic. Wuhan, of course, is the city where authorities reported the first known cluster of <keyword id="8763838" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="covid-19">COVID-19</keyword> cases. Below are the main reasons people think the virus might have emerged from the lab.</p><div type="image" title="wuhan institute of virology" height="2250" width="4000" msid="82974392" hostid="261"></div><h3>The <keyword id="8671082" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="wuhan-institute-of-virology">Wuhan Institute of Virology</keyword> was researching coronaviruses before the pandemic</h3><p>Scientists at the WIV research infectious diseases - collecting, storing, and genetically analyzing samples of the most dangerous and infectious pathogens known to humankind. The institute boasts a biosafety level 4 lab, one of only a few dozen in the world.</p><p>Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO scientist specializing in animal disease, was part of the team that investigated the institute in January. He said it's natural to speculate about a link - especially given that the WIV moved to a new location in early December 2019, which happens to be just miles from the Huanan Seafood Market.</p><p>The first cluster of coronavirus cases in Wuhan was linked to the market, but it turned out to simply have hosted an early superspreader event.</p><p>"Even the staff in these labs told us that was their first reaction when they heard about this new emerging disease, this coronavirus: 'This is something coming out of our labs,'" Ben Embarek said in March.</p><p>But after investigating that possibility, the WIV staff said they found no evidence that samples of the new coronavirus had been stored at the institute prior to December 2019. Records reviewed by WHO did not indicate that any viruses closely related to the new coronavirus were kept in any Chinese lab before that month. The records also did not show any viruses that, when combined, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9?utm_medium=affiliate&amp;utm_source=commission_junction&amp;utm_campaign=3_nsn6445_deeplink_PID100024934&amp;utm_content=deeplinkent=deeplink">could have produced the new coronavirus</a>.</p><p>But Ben Embarek's team also said it wasn't given full access to the Wuhan institute's data.</p><h3>WHO investigators couldn't conduct a full audit of the labs</h3><div type="image" title="wuhan institute of virology WHO" height="3628" width="4838" msid="82974397" hostid="261"></div><p>Ben Embarek said he and his fellow investigators didn't do a full audit of the WIV. The WHO team spent just hours at the institute - which isn't enough time to pore over files, databases, or freezer inventories. The institute's staff also did not share all of its records or safety logs.</p><p>That's why Tedros, Fauci, and many others are still calling for a full investigation of the lab.</p><p>However, Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Davis, has worked directly with WIV researchers, including one of its prominent virologists, Shi Zhengli. Mazet told Insider the lab's records were above reproach.</p><p>"She is absolutely positive that she had never identified this virus prior to the outbreak happening," Mazet <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-coronavirus-did-not-leak-from-wuhan-lab-researcher-2020-4">told Insider</a>, referring to Shi's work.</p><h3>WIV staff members got sick with 'COVID-like' symptoms in November 2019</h3><p>A report <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228?mod=hp_lead_pos7">uncovered by The Wall Street Journal</a> revealed that three WIV staff members got sick and went to a hospital more than a month before experts identified the first COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. The report - which an intelligence official said lacked sufficient corroboration - said the workers' symptoms were "consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."</p><p>According to the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/who-team-scientist-wuhan-lab-workers-fell-sick-in-2019-104497733806">virologist Marion Koopmans</a>, WHO team was aware that some WIV staff had gotten sick in the fall of 2019. They'd chalked the incidents up to season illness because blood samples taken from WIV staff in the months ahead of the pandemic all tested negative for coronavirus antibodies. (Such samples are taken routinely from biosafety lab workers to monitor their <keyword id="6354750" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="health">health</keyword>.)</p><h3>The coronavirus is easily transmissible among humans</h3><p>Generally, it takes time for a new virus to adapt to be able to spread easily from person to person.</p><p>So people like Redfield point to the coronavirus' highly infectious nature as evidence it may be a product of "gain-of-function" research. In this kind of work, scientists tweak viruses with the goal of making the pathogens more transmissible or deadlier to figure out how to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/">stop future pandemics</a>.</p><p>"I do not believe that this somehow came from a bat to a human, and at that moment in time that the virus came to the human became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission," Redfield <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield-coronavirus-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-3">told CNN</a> in March.</p><p>But <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6vku1PzLd0">Fauci said that same month</a> that it's more likely that the coronavirus got good at jumping between people while spreading "below the radar" in China in late 2019. Growing evidence suggests COVID-19 was spreading for several weeks, if not months, before the first cases were reported.</p><p>That allowed the virus "to be pretty well adapted when first recognized," Fauci said.</p><h3>Lab leaks happen, and US intelligence suggested the WIV had poor safety protocol</h3><div type="image" title="covid researchers wuhan" height="3809" width="5663" msid="82974400" hostid="261"></div><p>Three years ago, US officials visiting Wuhan sent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/">a pair of memos</a> to the State Department warning of inadequate safety measures at the lab. The institute seems to have made rigorous changes since then, though, and the WHO team was satisfied with the lab's protocols.</p><p>Ben Embarek said the WIV housed a "state-of-the-art lab," which is part of the reason his team thinks it's "very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place."</p><p>Mazet, too, has said it's "highly unlikely this was a lab accident," since she worked with WIV staff to develop and implement a "very stringent safety protocol."</p><p>Still, Ben Embarek noted in February that "accidents do happen."</p><p>"We have many examples in many countries in the world of past accidents," he said.</p><p>Though such accidents are rare, there have been <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/">four instances</a> in which SARS has leaked from laboratories in Taiwan, Singapore, and Beijing.</p><h3>The wildlife farms where the virus might have emerged are 1,000 miles from Wuhan</h3><div type="image" title="wuhan huanan market" height="2333" width="3500" msid="82974404" hostid="261"></div><p>The wildlife farms where the WHO team thinks the coronavirus most likely emerged are <a href="https://ca.news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-likely-traveled-800-miles-234039700.html">800 to 1,000 miles</a> from Wuhan.</p><p>But Koopmans said the WHO team found that rabbits and ferret-badgers sold at Huanan Seafood Market were transported there from regions in China where bats harbor viruses similar to the new coronavirus. Both rabbits and ferret-badgers are susceptible to coronavirus infection, so could have passed it to farmers who traveled into the city, or to market shoppers.</p><p>Still, just because the first reported cluster of cases emerged in Wuhan doesn't mean that's where the pandemic truly began. Wuhan is the largest city in Hubei province, and people from all over central China travel though the region. Once the virus arrived in a dense, urban environment, it makes sense it would spread rapidly there.</p><h2>The animal-spillover theory</h2><p>After the investigation in Wuhan, the WHO team determined the coronavirus "most likely" jumped from bats to people via an intermediary animal host at a wildlife farm. This kind of spillover has been the leading theory throughout the pandemic primarily because 75% of new infectious diseases come to us from animals. Plus, the coronavirus' genetic code is very similar to that of other coronaviruses found circulating in bats. Here's the evidence supporting this idea.</p><div type="image" title="WHO wuhan" height="2645" width="3968" msid="82974409" hostid="261"></div><h3>The WHO concluded that an animal-to-human hop is 'most likely'</h3><p>In southern China, the WHO found, people interacted closely with animals like civets, minks, pangolins, rabbits, and raccoon dogs at farms where these animals were bred in captivity for food.</p><p>All of these species can be infected by the new coronavirus, and any contact with an infected animal or its poop can allow a virus to jump from animals to people. That's why the WHO found this to be the "most likely" origin of the pandemic. Still, the team examined 80,000 animals from 31 provinces across China and didn't find a single case of the coronavirus. China shut down the specific wildlife farms in question in February 2020, and the WHO researchers <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/china/covid-china-who-probe-intl-hnk/index.html">weren't given access</a> to samples from animals from these farms.</p><p>Plus, according to Tedros, the WHO experts had <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-wuhan-scientists-initially-worried-coronavirus-leaked-lab-2021-3">difficulties accessing COVID-19 infection data</a> and patient blood samples from in and around Wuhan - which could also cast doubt on the team's conclusions.</p><p>The scientists behind the recent <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lab-leak-viable-theory-coronavirus-origin-scientists-say-2021-5">letter</a> about the lab-leak theory wrote that in the WHO's report, that possibility was "not given balanced consideration." Only four of the report's <a href="https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part">313 pages</a> discuss evidence of a lab accident.</p><h3>SARS-CoV-2 shares 97% of its genetic code with other coronaviruses found in bats</h3><div type="image" title="horseshoe bat" height="2323" width="3437" msid="82974412" hostid="261"></div><p>Bats are common virus reservoirs. Cross-species hops from bat populations also led to the outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, and the Nipah virus.</p><p>A wealth of evidence shows similarities between the new coronavirus and coronaviruses in bat populations. A <a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)30662-X">May 2020 study</a>, for example, revealed that the new coronavirus shared 97.1% of its genetic code with a coronavirus called RmYN02, which was found in bats in China's Yunnan province between May and October 2019. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7">A paper</a> in the journal Nature, published by Shi's group at the WIV, found that a coronavirus named RaTG13 was a 96.2% match.</p><p>RaTG13, it turns out, is the same virus that Shi and her WIV colleagues collected samples of nearly a decade ago in a remote mine. Six miners got a mysterious pneumonia-like illness there in 2012, and three of them died, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese-mine-covid-pandemic-11621871125?mod=hp_lead_pos5">according to The Wall Street Journal</a>. Blood samples from the miners didn't test positive for the new coronavirus, however.</p><p>When Shi and coauthors published their genetic analysis of RaTG13 last year, they <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese-mine-covid-pandemic-11621871125?mod=hp_lead_pos5">did not disclose its link</a> to the miners' deaths.</p><h3>Three-quarters of infectious diseases come from natural spillover</h3><div type="image" title="china rabbit farm" height="3560" width="5266" msid="82974415" hostid="261"></div><p>Three out of every four <a href="https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/infectious-diseases-conditions/world-zoonoses-day-most-emerging-infectious-diseases-originate">emerging infectious diseases</a> come to us from other species; these pathogens are known as zoonotic diseases.</p><p>Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance who was a member of the WHO investigation team, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/841729646/virus-researchers-cast-doubt-on-theory-of-coronavirus-lab-accident">told NPR in April 2020</a> that "1 to 7 million people" were exposed to zoonotic viruses in Southeast Asia each year.</p><p>"That's the pathway," he said. "It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field."</p><p>Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance have worked with and funded WIV research in the past, though that funding was canceled last year. Some people suggest Daszek has a bias against the lab-leak theory, since it could lead his organization to be seen as <a href="https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038">culpable</a> for funding research that led to the pandemic.</p><p>Still, spillover events have doubled - if not tripled - in the past 40 years, according to Dennis Carroll, the former director of USAID's emerging-threats division. That's because people are increasingly turning wild areas into farms and fields for livestock production.</p><p>"Whatever future threats we're going to face already exist - they are currently circulating in wildlife," Carroll <a href="http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-pandemic-coming">told Nautilus Magazine</a> last year.</p>

A lab leak in Wuhan versus a natural hop from bats: Evidence for each theory of the coronavirus pandemic's origin

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security</span></p><p class="caption">The executive committee to advice the President meets to discuss Clade X.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul><li><strong>The Clade X simulation, created by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, shows how vulnerable the world is to the spread of a pandemic virus.</strong></li><li><strong>In that simulation, political experts from the US tried to figure out how to respond to the emergence of a new and deadly disease.</strong></li><li><strong>Despite being a "moderately contagious" and "moderately lethal" virus, at the end of the day - 20 months in simulated time - the virus would have killed 150 million people.</strong></li><li><strong>According to the scenario's creator, if efforts to create a vaccine continued to fail, a disease like that could kill 900 million, or more than 10% of the global population.</strong></li></ul><p><br />The committee to advise the President first met approximately one month after the virus first appeared.</p><p>There had been more than 400 cases and 50 deaths so far, mostly split between Frankfurt, Germany, and Caracas, Venezuela.</p><p>Patients presented with fever, cough, and confusion. In a disturbing number of cases, encephalitis - swelling in the brain - caused patients to fall into a potentially fatal coma.</p><p>Researchers had been able to isolate what appeared to be a new pathogen, a disease-causing agent.</p><p>The virus seemed to be a new type of <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/parainfluenza/index.html">parainfluenza virus</a> from a family of respiratory viruses that normally cause mild illnesses like the cold. Scientists studying the disease couldn't identify where the virus fit in the parainfluenza family, so they referred to the pathogen as parainfluenza Clade X.</p><p>Health authorities said Clade X, which appeared to spread by coughing and to take up to a week before patients started showing severe symptoms, had pandemic potential.</p><p>This situation described here is fictional.</p><p>It's part of a scenario created by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, designed to see how real policy experts and government decisionmakers would respond to a similar situation.</p><p>The scenario was designed to be completely realistic, with a disease that could plausibly exist and a world that has the exact same resources to respond as we do now.</p><p>On May 15th, when the <a href="http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2018_clade_x_exercise/index.html">"Clade X" simulation</a> was played out real-time, the people acting out the scenario were the sorts of individuals who'd be responding to this situation in real life. The <a href="http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2018_clade_x_exercise/players/index.html">players included</a> former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Indiana Representative Susan Brooks (R), former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, and others with extensive experience.</p><p>Yet by the day's end, representing 20 months after the start of the outbreak, there were 150 million dead around the globe, and 15 to 20 million deaths in the US alone. With no vaccine for the illness yet ready, that death toll would have been expected to climb.</p><p>"I think we learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, devoted senior public officials who have lived through many crises still have trouble dealing with something like this," Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health Security and the designer of the Clade X simulation, told Business Insider. "And it's not because they are not good or smart or dedicated, it's because we don't have the systems we need to enable the kind of response we'd want to see."</p><p>If efforts to develop a vaccine continued to fail, Toner said a disease like this could kill 900 million people, or more than 10% of the world's population.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security</span></p><p class="caption">Participants debate solutions to Clade X, a bioengineered virus.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><h2>We've been lucky in the past</h2><p>A virus capable of wiping out more than 10% of the world might sound like it would need to be one of the most fatal, contagious diseases ever - as easy to catch as <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/transmission.html">measles</a>, which spreads to 90% of the non-vaccinated people near an infected person, but as fatal as Ebola.</p><p>This is not the case, according to Toner, who spent a year creating the simulation.</p><p>The Clade X virus that Toner and colleagues used in the simulation was only moderately contagious and moderately lethal. It spread as easily and was about as deadly as SARS, which infected more than 8,000 between 2002 and 2003, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/zika-birth-defects-show-threats-of-emerging-viruses-2016-7">killing about 10% of those infected</a>.</p><p>The world was lucky SARS wasn't worse. That virus wasn't particularly contagious until people were already very sick. As a result, it spread more in healthcare settings, once patients had landed in clinics and hospitals. That limited the spread of SARS in broader public spaces.</p><p>There's also evidence it mutated to become less virulent. SARS was stopped, but there was "a great deal of luck involved," according to Toner.</p><p>With Clade X, which theoretically would spread relatively fast in community settings (like SARS did in healthcare facilities), the world would not be as lucky.</p><p>"We think this scenario is quite plausible," said Toner.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Thomson Reuters</span></p><p class="caption">Coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, shown here, have pandemic potential.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><h2>'We don't want to provide a recipe for how to do this'</h2><p>Shortly after the committee to advise the President met to discuss how to respond to Clade X, the first case appeared in the US, at a university in Massachusetts.</p><p>New information about the pathogen emerged. Despite being a parainfluenza virus, Clade X also had genetic elements of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nipah-virus-outbreak-deaths-in-india-2018-5">Nipah virus, a rare but extremely lethal virus</a> that the World Health Organization considers an urgent research priority because of its potential to cause a pandemic.</p><p>In the simulation, the virus was bioengineered and released by a group known as A Brighter Dawn, with the intention of reducing the world's population back to pre-industrial levels. The group was largely modeled after the cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released the chemical weapon sarin on the Tokyo subway in 1995.</p><p>Before the sarin attack, Aum Shinrikyo reportedly tried to <a href="http://files.cnas.org.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/CNAS_AumShinrikyo_Danzig_1.pdf">develop biological weapons</a>. Advances in the field of synthetic biology make the production of deadly biological weapons a far simpler procedure today than when Aum Shinrikyo carried out attacks, to the point that many <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/pandemic-risk-to-humanity-2017-9">experts believe weaponized disease</a> may be the biggest threat humanity now faces.</p><p>Toner said researchers are convinced a virus like the one released by A Brighter Dawn could be created and released. But he said the simulation designers will not reveal exactly how they determined this disease would be designed.</p><p>"We don't want to provide a recipe for how to do this," he said.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Shutterstock/Tonhom1009</span></p><p class="caption">Creating a deadly virus using synthetic biology is less complicated than it used to be.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><h2>Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and the lessons learned</h2><p>The Center for Health Security has run two other major simulations before Clade X.</p><p>In June of 2001, a similar group of policy experts played the <a href="http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2001_dark-winter/about.html">Dark Winter</a> scenario, in which a terrorist group released smallpox at shopping malls in the US  - still a scary enough potential scenario that the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fda-approves-smallpox-drug-for-bioterrorism-2018-7">FDA for the first time this month approved a drug</a> to treat smallpox in case of an attack. An analysis of that exercise suggested that if the outbreak couldn't be stopped using vaccines within two months, the devastating illness could have infected 3 million and killed one million.</p><p>"People were just beginning to think of bioterrorism as a threat" at the time, said Toner. Not long after, the 9/11 attacks and <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/amerithrax-or-anthrax-investigation">anthrax letters</a> would convince the world that the threat of terrorism was of far greater concern.</p><p>In 2005, in the <a href="http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2005_atlantic_storm/">Atlantic Storm</a> exercise, political leaders played through another smallpox release scenario. By then, governments around the world had stockpiled smallpox vaccines. But as the health experts <a href="http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2005_atlantic_storm/flash/index.html">behind the scenario</a> explained after, a smallpox outbreak in a world with vaccines is not a worst-case scenario - other pandemics, naturally occurring or created, could be even more dangerous. Clade X reflects that.</p><p>Though Clade X involved a bioengineered virus, Toner said the response required wasn't necessarily different from what we'd need to deal with a naturally-emergent pathogen. A virus like Clade X could just as easily emerge naturally - if SARS had been just slightly different, it might even have been that virus.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>John Moore/Getty</span></p><p class="caption">Ebola also helped show how unprepared the world is for dealing with rapidly spreading diseases.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><h2>We aren't ready for what's coming</h2><p>A deadly disease with the potential to cause widespread loss of life around the world is coming. Whether it's manufactured or jumps to humans after spreading in animal species, that's considered a fact by infectious disease and bioterror experts.  </p><p>George Poste, an ex officio member of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, a group created to assess the state of biodefense in the US, previously told Business Insider it was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/pandemic-risk-to-humanity-2017-9">inevitable that a disease as deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic</a> that killed 50 million people would emerge again. </p><p>At a recent talk, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-warns-the-next-pandemic-disease-is-coming-2018-4">Bill Gates warned</a> that we're not prepared.</p><p>"In the case of biological threats, that sense of urgency is lacking," he said. "The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war."</p><p>Toner said the Clade X scenario highlighted many of the shortcomings in our global healthcare system.</p><p>"We don't have the ability to produce vaccines to a novel pathogen within months rather than decades and we don't have the global public health capabilities that would allow us to rapidly identify and control an outbreak before it becomes a pandemic," he said.</p><p>He also said that the health systems in the US and around the world aren't ready for the rapid surge in cases they'd see in the case of pandemic disease spread.</p><p>A pandemic could cause hospital systems to collapse under the pressure. Most people don't know how close we came to having that happen in the US in 2009, he said, due to a not particularly virulent flu strain.</p><p>We also don't have systems in place to deal with the overlap between healthcare, foreign policy, and national security.</p><p>"It will happen, but I don't know when," Toner said. Whenever it does, we have to hope that we'll be more prepared than we are now.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/lunar-eclipse-why-moon-is-blood-red-2018-7">Why the moon turns red during a total lunar eclipse</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

A leading medical institution created a simulation that shows how a new disease could kill 900 million people&#160;- and it reveals how unprepared we are

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