Experts are trying to get ahead of disease X – an unknown pathogen that could trigger a global pandemic – before it wipes out swathes of humanity. The Predict project has been looking through the animal kingdom to discover viruses which could one day mutate and evolve to kill of humanity. Now, a group of scientists from the Smithsonian Institute in the United States and University of California, have
discovered two new viruses in Myanmarese bats. The viruses which were discovered belonged to the coronavirus family which have already caused two outbreaks on Earth. One is the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which infected about 8,000 people in 2003. The other is the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) which has a 35 percent mortality rate and was first identified in 2012. READ MORE
