High impact disease outbreaks such as Ebola could become the "new normal", the World Health Organization has said.
Dr Mike Ryan, WHO’s assistant director for emergencies, said that a range of factors such as population movement, conflict and poor governance were coming together to create a perfect storm for disease outbreaks.
He made the stark warning in the week that the latest Ebola epidemic in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hit more than 2,000 cases.
“We are entering a new phase in terms of high impact epidemics and this isn’t just Ebola. You look at cholera, yellow fever, many other diseases - we’re seeing both re-emergence and resurgence,” Dr Ryan said.
He added that 80 per cent of such epidemics were occurring in fragile, conflict-affected states such as DRC.
“So we’re seeing a very worrying convergence of risks. Areas of high biodiversity, high population density, high population mobility, weak governance, conflict and many other things layered on top of each other,” he said.
WHO is currently monitoring 160 different disease events around the world, including 33 emergencies, nine of which are grade three, requiring the highest level of operational response.
Top of this list is the Ebola outbreak in DRC, which was first declared last August but in recent weeks has escalated, with more than 1,000 cases in the last two months alone.
A combination of mistrust from the community, violence and poor accessibility has meant that authorities have struggled to bring it under control and the latest figures from the DRC ministry of health show there have been 2,031, cases including 1,367 deaths.
And authorities in India this week scrambled to control an outbreak of the highly deadly Nipah virus after a 23-year-old man contracted the disease. The virus has a 75 per cent mortality rate and there is no treatment or vaccine.
It is one of a list of diseases, including Ebola, which WHO says has the potential to cause a global pandemic because it is highly contagious and for which there are limited control tools.
Zoonotic diseases, those that spread from animals to humans such as Nipah, are emerging as animal habitats are destroyed through deforestation, said Dr Ryan.
And he added that factors such as antimicrobial resistance and climate change were also adding to the risk of greater outbreaks.
“All these things say this is a new normal - I don’t expect the frequency of these events to reduce. And I do think we need to get better at prediction, get better at risk reduction and preparedness,” he said.
“Preparedness has to be a major goal for the world - responding to these events one after another is not a solution,” he added.
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