History is replete with epidemics that have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. One of the deadliest so-called “Spanish flu” struck nearly a third of the population, and its mortality rate was about 20%. And recently, scientists from the school of public health at Johns Hopkins University published a report in which it called, what features will have an infection that may cause new pandemics in the future.
Scientists believe the new virus need to treat RNA viruses. Despite the fact that RNA is less stable than DNA, it allows the virus to quickly mutate and adapt to drugs and immune system of living organisms. One of the brightest representatives of ever-changing RNA viruses, well known to everyone the flu. It is the impossibility of quick mutations to our happiness, according to experts, and prevented the viruses Ebola and Zeke cause a pandemic.
Returning to the description of the virus: it needs to airborne, and most importantly, it needs to infect a new host before the carrier will develop the first symptoms. Moreover, the infection should be characterized by a relatively low level of lethality, at least at first. Also, as scientists say, a virus can be the ability to “hibernate” inside our body, and this can be a major problem: because a person looks healthy, but it can be a “walking bomb”, which at any moment will bring the epidemic to a new level.
Scientists have determined features of the virus that will cause a pandemic
Vladimir Kuznetsov