I'm redoing my old "who's next" post because it was way too short and I want to get every detail right — the new virus catalog from Mark Woolhouse’s team at Edinburgh is seriously worth breaking down fully. We normally see two or three novel viruses per year since the 60s, but HIV (1983) and SARS-CoV-2 (2020) were the ones that killed tens of millions each. The new framework separates threats by transmission risk: roughly two-thirds are zoonotic — Rabies is one such virus — meaning people catch them from animals rather than other humans, which reduces panic about bird flu since no RNA virus has ever jumped from animal-only to widespread human transmission despite thousands of rabies cases annually. A far greater threat comes from viruses already transmissible among humans that become more contagious or enter denser populations; Zaire ebolavirus in 2014 and recent outbreaks with Chikungunya, Zika, Oropouche, and mpox all started as rare but became major epidemics when conditions changed. Even the newer Andes hantavirus on a cruise ship and Bundibugyo ebolavirus currently spreading highlight that these rare pathogens can emerge unexpectedly — which is precisely what we need to catch earlier next time.
The model also predicts "disease X" by looking at genomic relationships, showing how SARS-CoV2 emerged as an independently jumped virus related to original SARS but distinct enough to be a new threat — exactly why the WHO flagged it in 2019 before it hit. Contrast that with the Andes and Bundibugyo strains, which don't have pandemic profiles; if a novel measles-related virus were what emerged instead, it would likely have been worse than COVID because of its transmission profile. The big takeaway is that both newer outbreaks — plus covid itself — spread for weeks before detection, so faster identification could deny the next pathogen the head start it got in 2019 and save millions. I'm a huge fan of this kind of predictive epidemiology.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/new-virus-catalog-reveals-which-pathogens-pose-the-greatest-threat/
The model also predicts "disease X" by looking at genomic relationships, showing how SARS-CoV2 emerged as an independently jumped virus related to original SARS but distinct enough to be a new threat — exactly why the WHO flagged it in 2019 before it hit. Contrast that with the Andes and Bundibugyo strains, which don't have pandemic profiles; if a novel measles-related virus were what emerged instead, it would likely have been worse than COVID because of its transmission profile. The big takeaway is that both newer outbreaks — plus covid itself — spread for weeks before detection, so faster identification could deny the next pathogen the head start it got in 2019 and save millions. I'm a huge fan of this kind of predictive epidemiology.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/new-virus-catalog-reveals-which-pathogens-pose-the-greatest-threat/