A study published in 2017 stated that the most likely place to discover emerging pathogens would be to look among human and animal interactions, or for zoonotic viruses. In this paper, it is also stated that the majority of recent viral pandemics have been caused by zoonotic viruses, so the logical thing would be to find potentially novel zoonotic viruses that could be the cause of a future pandemic, or Disease X. Such a feat of identifying these viruses can be achieved through the newly announced Global Virome Project that will launch this year, whose sole goal is to find unknown viruses. The Global Virome Project would run over the next ten years and would cost 1.2 billion dollars to implement.
An already existing US Agency for International Development already works to prevent future pandemics by identifying zoonotic viruses, as this group has already discovered around 1,000 viruses that are zoonotic in nature. The only difference between USAID and the Global Virome Project would be that the Global Virome Project would be at a much larger scale.
Very excited to see how the Global Virome Project goes, and whether or not they can pinpoint ideal candidates for Disease X!
-Daniel Gutierrez
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