A leading scientist has just suggested that another deadly pandemic caused by “Disease X” could be just around the corner.

Mark Woolhouse is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. In 2017, he and some colleagues convinced the World Health Organization (WHO) to add what they called “Disease X” to its list of priority diseases.

“We thought that the next emerging pandemic might be a virus that we don’t even know about yet – quite frankly we thought it was the most likely scenario,” Woolhouse said.

According to Woolhouse, the following year, experts talked about what that disease might be. One possibility they discussed was a novel coronavirus related to Mers or Sars.

“I mean, it really couldn’t be more accurate than that. This new virus is so closely related to Sars, so they absolutely pinpointed it as one of the threats,” Woolhouse said.

When asked if the next “Disease X” could be around the corner, Woolhouse said “absolutely.”

“You could use the phrase ‘it is when, not if’. We can’t put a handle on when, of course. The precise mechanism by which a virus comes out is always extremely unpredictable. You can never predict precise events, so you have to do it on sort of statistical grounds probability,” he said.

Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum, one of the doctors who helped discover Ebola, has also warned about the emergence of new diseases.

“We are now in a world where new pathogens will come out,” he told CNN. “And that’s what constitutes a threat for humanity.”

According to Professor Woolhouse, every year or two scientists are discovering one or two viruses that are transmissible to humans. This rate has been constant for more than 50 years.

When asked if policymakers will be thinking more about the risk of future pandemics, Woolhouse said, “I’m not sure that there’s a lot of thinking going on about the next threat, while the world is concentrating full tilt on dealing with the one it’s got. I absolutely agree that there needs to be more thought about that.”