What are the viral risks for 2024?
by Prof. Hervé Fleury, MD-PhD | Ventum Biotech Scientific Board Member
SARS-CoV-2 surveillance must be maintained, in particular the "of interest" and "of concern" variants; currently the JN.1 variant has replaced B.A.2.86 with an additional mutation at position 455 of the spike; JN.1 has expanded rapidly in the USA, Canada, UK, Singapore and France; this variant appears to be susceptible to the latest generation of RNA vaccines; the problem is that it appears in the winter season and is added to other circulating respiratory viruses (influenza, RSV, etc.).
The AH5N1 avian flu continues its global progression, mammalian infections from wild birds are multiplying (seals, felines, etc.); the increased risk of recombination between a human influenza virus and the H5N1 strain or of adaptation of H5N1 to humans; The last influenza pandemic in humans was AH1N1pdm 2009 which was a recombinant in Mexican pigs between avian, porcine, and human influenza viruses.
In the US, concern is about chronic wasting disease, which is linked to a prion and could be part of what was mad cow disease in the 1980s in the UK and France. It is an infectious protein that can be transmitted through the digestive tract between elks; The whole question is whether this prion can be transmitted to humans to give a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; The risk seems possible, and the US authorities have asked elk hunters not to consume the meat and to bring biological samples to veterinary laboratories.
In Asia, the year 2023 confirmed the danger of the Nipah virus in some areas such as Bangladesh and India (where an outbreak was recorded in Kerala); It should be remembered that the reservoir is the bat and that humans are infected by contact with pigs (which are themselves infected by bats) or by contact with palm juice contaminated by bat urine. The disease is encephalitis, with a mortality rate of around 70%.
In Europe, particularly in southern Western Europe and in particular in the French region of Aquitaine, an increase in arboviruses is to be expected during the summer period; It should be remembered that the Gironde (Aquitaine department) experienced its first autochthonous human cases of West Nile virus in 2023, a virus carried by migratory birds and transmitted to humans by Culex or Aedes mosquitoes.
