Disease X is a fascinating hunt for the next pandemic ...Middle East

Doctor and broadcaster Chris van Tulleken had a deeper and more traumatic encounter with Covid-19 than many. Not only did he tend to the sick at UCL hospital in London from the start of the pandemic, but his twin brother X suffered serious heart problems after catching the virus. Rather admirably, he mentions none of this during his new BBC Two documentary Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic.

But then this film is not one of those “all about me” documentaries (in any case, he covered his experiences with Covid in his more personal 2020 documentary, Surviving the Virus: My Brother and Me). Instead, this is Tulleken’s global search for clues about the next pandemic and – in the opinion of all the experts here – a new one is coming. It’s just a question of when, where and in which viral form.

Tulleken’s first stop is Geneva and the shiny headquarters of the World Health Organisation (WHO). We get to see inside the WHO’s “emergency operations centre” as Tulleken joins one of their daily meetings that track viral outbreaks across the globe. Today, it’s yellow fever in America, anthrax in Uganda and an eight-year-old boy with bird flu in Vietnam. Ebola, Marburg, influenza and our old friend, the coronavirus, are other lurking pathogens.

There are currently two prime suspects for “disease X”. The first is Henipavirus, which has been transmitted from pigs to humans in Malaysia. In the film’s most moving sequence, Tulleken visits a Bangladeshi hospital where a seven-year-old boy is gravely ill with suspected Henipavirus, staring vacantly into space following a series of convulsions. The boy is the same age as his daughter, Tulleken tells the distressed mother before he tearfully confides to the camera that he isn’t used to seeing children this sick.

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The other is H5N1 – better known as bird flu. In California, he meets a cattle rancher to hear about how raw, unpasteurised milk from H5N1-infected cows has been found to transmit bird flu to domestic cats. How long before it mutates to infect humans when one million Americans regularly drink raw milk and millions more cuddle their moggies?

There are countless different viruses in mammals, explains Professor Linfa Wang, whose bat-filled Singapore laboratory has earned him the inevitable sobriquet of the “bat man”. These viruses are more likely to jump from animals to humans as cities increasingly encroach on wildlife habitats.

Back in the UK, Tulleken hears an intriguing hypothesis from data analysts, this one related to human behaviour. In short, the higher the fatality rate of a given virus, the more precautions we take. A virus with a 50 per cent mortality rate would therefore be heavily policed and fatalities minimised. But one with a 3 per cent mortality rate (and several already widespread viruses exceed this) would elicit a much more lax approach, leading to a projected global total of 140 million deaths. Covid, by comparison, is estimated to have killed eight million people.

Following the untimely death of Michael Mosley, medical science needs a broadcaster of Mosley’s popular reach. Tulleken shares the late doctor’s engaging personality and ability to clearly communicate complex ideas. Horizon can sometimes baffle, but this documentary never once got ahead of me. It’s not all doom and gloom, either, as Tulleken notes that we can now identify new viruses and develop vaccines and medicines faster than ever before.

Although this was a scientific and not a political documentary, the two are not entirely separable. Towards the end, Tulleken voices a thought that had accompanied me throughout his film: what about America? Donald Trump has cancelled US funding of the WHO, while his Health Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has dismantled federal vaccine programmes. “It’s so sad,” says Professor Wang, the bat man. “Because we’re fighting a common enemy.”

‘Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic’ is streaming on BBC iPlayer

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