Fauci warns of ‘pandemic era’ with deadly diseases on way

COVID-19 is a sign that humanity has entered a “pandemic era” and is likely to face a cascade of other dangerous diseases, the US government’s top infectious disease expert has warned.

Human activity is greatly contributing to the emergence of new diseases, and any scientific advances alone will not be able to stop them, warned Anthony Fauci and epidemiologist David Morens.

The emergence of potentially deadly viruses – like Sars in 2002 from a civet cat, Mers in 2012 from a camel and now Covid-19 – is likely to continue, they said.

That these recent viruses jumped from animals to humans suggests they “are only the latest examples of a deadly barrage of coming coronavirus and other emergences”, the authors wrote in Cell, a scientific journal.

Pandemics have arisen throughout human history, but as societies get larger and more complicated “we create an endless variety of opportunities for genetically unstable infectious agents to emerge”.

The authors, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that while that situation was not new, “we now live in a human-dominated world in which our increasingly extreme alterations of the environment induce increasingly extreme backlashes from nature”.

Dr Fauci has become a household name in the US for his analysis and guidance during the pandemic.

But he has frequently been at odds with Donald Trump, the US president.

The paper said that humanity remained at risk for the foreseeable future.