Senior scientists have warned that influenza may lead to the emergence of a new pandemic in the near future, according to what the British newspaper 'The Guardian' reported.
The source indicated that an international investigative study, scheduled to be published at the end of next week, will reveal that 57 percent of senior disease experts believe that a strain of the influenza virus will be the cause of the next global outbreak of deadly infectious diseases.
In this regard, John Salmanton Garcia from the University of Cologne, who conducted the study, said, 'The belief that influenza is the biggest global pandemic threat depends on long-term research showing that it constantly evolves and changes.'
"Influenza has remained, to a large extent, the first threat in terms of its ability to spread epidemically in the view of a large majority of scientists worldwide."
After influenza, the next most likely cause of a pandemic may be a virus - referred to as "Disease X" - that is still scientifically unknown, according to 21 percent of the experts who participated in the study.
They believe that the upcoming pandemic will be caused by a microscopic organism that has not yet been identified and will suddenly appear, just as the Sars-CoV-2 virus appeared, which caused Covid-19 when it began to infect humans at the end of 2019.
Other deadly microorganisms, such as Lassa, Nipah, Ebola, and Zika viruses, have been classified as serious global threats by only 1 to 2 percent of the participants.
The study results, with the participation of 187 top scientists, are scheduled to be presented at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) conference in Barcelona at the end of next week.