The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday it was looking for the greatest scientific minds to advise on investigations into new high-threat pathogens that jump from animals to humans and could spark the next pandemic. From a report: Launching a request for applications, it said that its Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens would also review progress on the next studies into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that emerged in China in late 2019. “We need to bring in the best minds here. And it needs to be multi-disciplinary,” Maria van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told Reuters.
The panel, announced by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in July, will be composed of 25 experts expected to meet first virtually in late September, a statement said. “In the last 20 years we’ve had many of these pathogens emerge or re-emerge: SARS, MERS, different avian influenzas, Zika, yellow fever and of course SARS-CoV-2,” van Kerkhove said. Van Kerkhove, an American epidemiologist and WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, recalled that it took more than a year to establish that dromedary camels were the intermediary source of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) carried by bats.
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