There is no new pandemic declared as of mid-2025. The World Health Organization currently lists three ongoing health emergencies requiring global attention: COVID-19, cholera, and mpox. But the question reflects a real anxiety, and several threats are being closely watched by public health agencies worldwide, particularly avian influenza and drug-resistant infections.
Threats Under Active Surveillance
The pathogen generating the most concern right now is H5N1 bird flu. Between March and June 2025, 20 human cases of avian influenza were reported across six countries, including four deaths. The infections occurred in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Mexico, and Vietnam, mostly among people who had direct contact with infected animals. No human-to-human transmission has been documented during that period, which is the critical threshold that would signal true pandemic risk.
European health authorities currently rate the risk of H5N1 infection as low for the general public and low-to-moderate for people who work with poultry, cattle, or other animals that may carry the virus. The CDC maintains an active surveillance system specifically designed to catch the moment an avian or swine flu virus begins behaving differently, flagging any unusual test results for immediate investigation. The concern isn’t what the virus is doing today. It’s what it could do if it mutates to spread easily between people.
H5N1 has also been detected in U.S. dairy cattle. The FDA tested 275 raw milk samples from farms in affected states and found infectious virus in 39 of them, at roughly 3,000 virus particles per milliliter. Pasteurization eliminates the threat completely: standard commercial processing destroyed about 1 trillion virus particles per milliliter in repeated experiments. All 464 pasteurized dairy products the FDA tested, including milk, cheese, butter, and ice cream, came back negative for live virus. Raw milk is a different story. H5N1 survived in raw milk cheese even after 60 days of aging.
Mpox Continues to Spread
Mpox remains an active global concern with two distinct strains circulating. The clade I outbreak, which originated in Central and Eastern Africa, has produced more than 46,000 cases and has spread to other continents through travel-associated infections, including recent outbreaks in some European countries. Clade Ia carries a fatality rate of about 2.5%, while the related clade Ib strain is less deadly at under 0.5%.
Separately, the clade IIb strain that drove the 2022 global outbreak has now caused more than 100,000 cases across 122 countries, including 115 where mpox had never been reported before. Several West African countries have been experiencing a new wave of clade II cases since the summer of 2025. While mpox hasn’t reached pandemic scale, it continues expanding geographically, and the WHO still considers it an active emergency.
The “Silent Pandemic” of Drug Resistance
Some public health experts already use the word “pandemic” for antimicrobial resistance, the growing ability of bacteria to survive the antibiotics designed to kill them. In 2019, drug-resistant bacterial infections directly killed an estimated 1.27 million people worldwide and played a role in 4.95 million deaths. Those numbers have continued to climb. Unlike a viral outbreak that arrives suddenly, antimicrobial resistance builds gradually, making it easy to overlook even as it erodes the effectiveness of modern medicine. Routine surgeries, cancer treatments, and even minor infections become more dangerous when antibiotics stop working.
What “Disease X” Actually Means
You may have seen the term “Disease X” in headlines. It doesn’t refer to a specific illness. The WHO coined it in 2018 as a placeholder on its priority pathogen list, representing a future pandemic caused by a pathogen we don’t yet know about. COVID-19 turned out to be the first real-world Disease X.
In 2024, WHO experts systematically evaluated 1,625 pathogens from 28 viral families and one major bacterial group. They identified 34 as “pathogens X,” meaning they have meaningful potential to cause the next pandemic. Coronaviruses and influenza viruses ranked as the top two priorities. This is why bird flu surveillance gets so much attention: influenza viruses are considered among the likeliest candidates for a future pandemic, alongside a new coronavirus.
The WHO’s priority list also includes Nipah virus (which spreads from fruit bats and has fatality rates above 40%), Lassa fever, Ebola, Marburg virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and Rift Valley fever. These are less likely to cause a global pandemic because they tend to burn out quickly or spread less efficiently, but they remain dangerous in regional outbreaks.
Why the Risk Keeps Growing
The frequency of new viruses jumping from animals to humans is increasing, driven by forces that are accelerating rather than slowing down. Deforestation, agricultural expansion, habitat loss, and urban sprawl all push people into closer contact with wildlife that carries unfamiliar pathogens. Organizations including the WHO, the UN Environment Programme, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity have all identified this overlap between environmental destruction and disease emergence as a primary driver of pandemic risk.
The math is straightforward: more contact between humans and animal hosts, in more disrupted ecosystems, creates more opportunities for a virus to make the jump. COVID-19, mpox, Ebola, and H5N1 all originated in animals. The conditions that produced them haven’t changed.
How the World Is Preparing
The World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement on May 20, 2025, the first international treaty specifically designed for pandemic preparedness. It will enter into force once 60 countries ratify it. The agreement establishes a global supply chain network to distribute vaccines and treatments more equitably, creates a system for sharing pathogen samples and genomic data across borders, and sets up financing mechanisms so lower-income countries can build their own surveillance and response capacity.
One provision has drawn particular public attention: the agreement explicitly states that it does not give the WHO authority to impose lockdowns or vaccine mandates on any country. Decisions about domestic public health measures remain with national governments.
On the vaccine front, international efforts are focused on compressing development timelines. The goal, known as the 100 Days Mission, is to have a new vaccine ready for emergency authorization within 100 days of a pandemic pathogen being identified. Current estimates put realistic timelines between 100 and 230 days depending on the pathogen, but the target has already been hit once: mpox vaccines received emergency pediatric authorization within 100 days of the health emergency declaration. Ongoing work on platform technologies (vaccine designs that can be quickly adapted to new viruses) aims to make that speed the norm rather than the exception.