These viruses are the most likely to trigger the next pandemic, scientists predict - Fox News

A new online tool ranks viruses by their potential to jump from animals to people and cause pandemics.

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is the latest pathogen to "spill over" from animals to people, but hundreds of thousands of other viruses lurking in animals could pose a similar threat.

Now, a new online tool ranks viruses by their potential to hop from animals to people and cause pandemics.

The tool, called SpillOver, essentially creates a "watch list" of newly discovered animal viruses that pose the greatest threat to human health.

Some 250 viruses are known to be "zoonotic," meaning they have already spilled over from animals to people, and an estimated 500,000-plus viruses have spillover potential, the researchers wrote in a paper about the SpillOver tool, published Monday (April 5) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The top 12 viruses on the list were known zoonotic pathogens, with Lassa virus ranking first, SARS-CoV-2 second and Ebola virus third.

The researchers said their tool ranks the potential for future spillover events.

Among viruses that aren't yet zoonotic, the top-ranking virus was coronavirus 229E (bat strain), which belongs to the same viral family as SARS-CoV-2 and infects bats in Africa, according to information from SpillOver.

The authors noted that SpillOver is a crowdsourcing platform that allows other researchers to contribute data on viruses already included on the list or to add viruses to the list, and the rankings may change as new data are added.