445 - Disease X and Preparing for the Next Pandemic
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2022
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is Disease X? Dr. Amesh Adalja and Dr. Anita Cicero of the Center for Health Security return to the podcast to talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the unknown cause of the next pandemic, which is likely to come from a viral family already known but poorly studied. They talk about how investing now to develop medical countermeasures like diagnostic tests and treatments could buy valuable time and save many lives when the next threat emerges.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.4 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call, and today the topic is |
| 0:47.1 | disease X. Our experts are Anita Cicero and Amesh Adulja of the Johns Hopkins Center for |
| 0:53.1 | Health Security. The host is Dr. Josh |
| 0:55.7 | Sharfstein. You may be wondering just what is disease X. Let's listen. Amish Adalja, Anita Cicero, |
| 1:04.2 | thank you so much for joining me in Public Health on Call to talk about disease X. Dr. Adelja, |
| 1:10.6 | I'll start with you. What is disease X? |
| 1:13.1 | Disease X is a concept that arose from the fact that when we're thinking about pandemic |
| 1:18.2 | preparedness, we're not always going to know what the pandemic pathogen is going to be. It could be |
| 1:23.5 | something that we've never heard of. It could be something that's not on anybody's list. |
| 1:28.1 | And we still have to prepare for it because it is going to be something that's going to be very |
| 1:33.4 | disruptive and cause a lot of destruction. And even if we don't know what it is, there's actions |
| 1:38.9 | you can take today to prepare for disease X, even if we don't know specifically which virus |
| 1:44.0 | it's going to be. |
| 1:45.5 | What are some of those actions? The principal action is going to be developing medical |
| 1:49.3 | countermeasures. Medical countermeasures include vaccines, diagnostic tests, treatments, |
| 1:54.7 | and what we really need to do is do this proactively to think about what are the most likely |
| 2:00.3 | candidates to cause a pandemic. |
... |
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