The next pandemic

Think Ebola is alarming? Scientists expect a much deadlier virus to emerge in the not-distant future.

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(Image credit: (AP Photo/Lo Sai Hung ))

How likely is a pandemic?

Epidemiologists believe we're statistically overdue for a global viral outbreak, which occurs every generation or so. This year's Ebola crisis is probably just a dress rehearsal: Though the virus has killed at least 1,420 people in Africa in the last five months, Ebola is transmitted only through intimate contact with bodily fluids and doesn't have the global reach of a true pandemic, such as Spanish influenza in 1918. Humanity had no prior exposure or immunity to the Spanish flu, which is believed to have incubated in birds and pigs. So it spread like wildfire, infecting about 500 million people and killing about 50 million of them. The next pandemic is most likely to emerge in a remote region of Asia or Africa, from contact between people and poultry, rats, bats, pigs, monkeys, or some other animal. If that virus can be spread through the air or by touch, the way the common cold is, it will sweep from village to city, and air travel will allow it to hop continents within hours. A vaccine will take at least months of frantic work to develop, and in the meantime, millions will die. "The three deadliest events in human history were all infectious diseases," says medical historian David Morens: the Spanish flu, the Black Death (bubonic plague), and AIDS. "There are lots of reasons to think more will be coming."

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