The human population seems to be experiencing an upsurge and overflowing with pandemics that have restricted survival. While the world had come to a standstill in the last two years due to the deadly novel coronavirus, now the emergence of a new virus has raised concerns.
The global increase of monkeypox cases has forced them World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a pandemic.
An infectious disease is said to emerge when the virus is new to the global register, when its infecting agent has become more transmissible or more dangerous, or when it is rapidly spreading to new areas.
Does it tell a grim story about the potential threat of emerging viruses in the 21st century?
Here’s a look at all the emerging viruses in the 21st century.
COVID-19
Kovid-19 emerged in the city of Wuhan, China in late 2019. It is caused by a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, The virus has progressed in many mutations so it has become quite difficult to stop the spread globally. The virus has killed more than 6.2 million people, according to a tally by the US Johns Hopkins University as of the end of May.
However, the World Health Organization says that there have been a total of 14.9 million additional deaths globally directly or indirectly linked to Kovid.
The pandemic mobilized around the world, leading to the rapid provision of several large-scale effective vaccines.
The WHO said it is still investigating the origins of COVID, but “the strongest evidence is still around zoonotic transmission” – which occurs when a virus jumps from animals to humans.
MERS
Found in Saudi Arabia in 2012, the middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS) is a viral respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus transmitted through camels.
Although its transmission rate between humans is low, it causes death in a third of cases. The WHO’s last official count, published in September 2019, states that MERS has killed more than 850 people.
SARS
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), also a coronavirus, emerged in late 2002 in southern China. It is believed to have been transmitted from bats to humans via a civet – a mammal whose meat is sold in Chinese markets.
SARS causes acute forms of pneumonia and has a mortality rate of 9.5 percent. Two decades ago the outbreak spread to nearly 30 countries, killing 774 people, most of them in China.
ebola
First identified in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire), the virus, whose natural host is the bat, has since set off a chain of epidemics in Africa, killing some 15,000 people.
Between 2013 and 2016 the worst epidemic in West Africa alone killed more than 11,300 people. There have been more than a dozen epidemics in DR Congo, the deadliest death toll in 2020 at 2,280.
marburg
First identified in 1967 after research on imported African green monkeys in Germany and the former Yugoslavia, Marburg virus is from the same family as Ebola and kills about one in two of those infected. The worst outbreak in Angola in 2005 killed 329 people.
Zika, Chikungunya, Dengue
These three viruses cause similar, flu-like symptoms and are spread through mosquito bites. Cases paralleled the spike in tiger mosquito populations in the early 2000s.
The Zika virus, first discovered in 1947 in a Ugandan monkey, caused its first epidemic in Micronesia in 2007, before exploding in Latin America in 2015, particularly in Brazil.
A great danger of the virus is severe malformations in babies of infected mothers during pregnancy.
Chikungunya spread to Africa from 2004 and reached Asia as well as the Indian Ocean before reaching the Caribbean from 2013 before a 2015 outbreak in Latin America. It causes fever and joint pain that usually subsides after a few days or sometimes weeks.
Dengue, which occurs mainly in tropical and sub-tropical regions, is often mild, but can be fatal in rare cases.
Cases notified to WHO increased tenfold between 2000 and 2020 and the disease is endemic in more than 100 countries in Africa, Latin America, the Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.