We were warned

The coronavirus is filling the world with fear and anxiety as its lethal tentacles cross international borders (YOU, 27 February). Medical scientists are still striving to find a vaccine to contain this new outbreak.

We’re on the front line in a new scientific race to predict the next pandemic, and of the roughly 400 emerging infectious diseases that have been identified since 1940, more than 60% came from animals.

Poverty has moved people in developing countries to eat vermin, rodents and insects. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Professor John Oxford, a virologist at the University of London and a world authority on epidemics, warned in 2015 that the world could expect an animal-originated pandemic to strike within the next five years, with potentially cataclysmic effects.

Before it even had a name, it would have started to cut its lethal swathe through the world’s population, he predicted, adding that the World Health Organisation would be caught flat-footed.

His prediction has become a grim and frightening reality. My fear is that in years to come countries will use viruses as an instrument of biological warfare. FAROUK ARAIE, JOHANNESBURG

I was having a turnout and came across a letter dated 14 April 2003 from a Chinese friend who lives in Hong Kong. In it he told me there was an epidemic of coronavirus there and about 40 people a day were succumbing to it. So versions of it seem to have been in China for a long time! MARGARET, SMS