Current outbreak signals
Events in WHO Disease Outbreak News from the last 180 days, placed by country and coloured by risk score.
| Risk | Event | Class | Reported | Cases | Deaths |
|---|
Click a column to sort. Case and death counts are parsed automatically from WHO summaries; blank means none were stated. Open the WHO report for exact figures.
CDC travel notices
Pathogen watchlist
Qualitative assessments. No exact probabilities are published for individual pathogens; levels are our estimates based on the sources cited.
Where: hotspots
Current activity is measured by the number of WHO outbreak reports that mention each country in the last 365 days. Structural spillover risk comes from the research literature.
WHO reports per country (365 days)
Structural risk drivers
Allen et al. (2017) find that emerging zoonoses most often arise in tropical forest regions with high mammal diversity, changing land use and growing populations: mainly West & Central Africa, South & Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America.
Weak preparedness amplifies risk: the Global Health Security Index 2021 found that no country was fully prepared for a major epidemic or pandemic.
- Highest structural risk (estimate)Central Africa, SE Asia, South Asia
- Highest current activity—
- Influenza watchPoultry & dairy (US, Asia)
Consequences: three scenarios
World Bank influenza pandemic scenarios (Burns, van der Mensbrugghe & Timmer, 2008). Model estimates, not forecasts.
For comparison: WHO estimates COVID-19 excess mortality at about 14.9 million in 2020–2021. Fan, Jamison & Summers (2018) estimate expected annual losses from pandemic influenza at about US$500 billion (≈0.6% of global income), including the value of lives lost.
Method & sources
Base rate
Cumulative probability = 1 − (1 − p)n, assuming independent years (a simplification). p ≈ 2%/yr for a COVID-scale pandemic (Marani et al. 2021) and ≈ 1%/yr for a severe, 1918-scale pandemic (Madhav et al. 2017).
Risk score (estimate)
Pathogen class × 2 (novel/unknown or respiratory = 4, henipa/hanta = 3, haemorrhagic fever or mpox = 2, vector-borne/other = 1) + log₁₀(cases + 1), capped at 3, + 2 if multi-country, + 2 if reported ≤ 14 days ago (1 if ≤ 45 days). Rescaled to 0–10. Respiratory pathogens weigh most because historical pandemics have almost always spread through the airways.