disease X
Sign in to saveAlso known as pathogen X
placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on a shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic
In the Vinony graph
Vinony's link graph records 1,378 inbound references to disease X, and connects out to Geneva, pathogen and zoonosis.
It sits within the topics Disaster management, Pandemics and Placeholder names.
Vinony links it to 28 Wikipedia language editions.
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- disease
Show 4 more facts
- used by
- World Health Organization
- inception
- 2018-02-00
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- WikiProject COVID-19
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~16 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Colored scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of SARS-CoV-2, speculated in 2020 as being the first virus to create Disease X
Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen. The WHO adopted the placeholder name to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen (e.g., broader vaccines and manufacturing facilities). Former Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci stated that the concept of Disease X would encourage WHO projects to focus their research efforts on entire classes of viruses (e.g., flaviviruses), instead of just individual strains (e.g., zika virus), thus improving WHO capability to respond to unforeseen strains.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “disease X” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.