A doctor has shed light on "disease X" - the potential trigger of a future worldwide pandemic. Named by the World Health Organisation (WHO), this disease signifies the next hypothetical pathogen "lurking around the corner".

In a video posted to TikTok, Brit NHS doctor Suraj Kukadia elaborated further. Addressing his over 300,000 followers, he asked: "What is disease X?

“Have you ever heard of it? It's a term coined by the World Health Organisation, who imagine it as a big question mark on the global health map, symbolising the unknown infectious diseases that might just be lurking around the corner.

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"Disease X is the name assigned to any as yet unidentified pathogen which, in theory, has the potential to spark a global pandemic."

It was designated in 2018, as part of an initiative to promote international pandemic readiness efforts. The idea was that preparing for the emergence of an unknown infectious disease could result in a faster, more effective public health response.

Amesh Adalja, MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, provided further explanation on the John Hopkins website.

The infectious disease physician stated: "With disease X, we're preparing for an unknown unknown. Disease X is a placeholder concept that refers to a pandemic pathogen that has not yet been characterised.

"Its purpose is to encourage proactive thinking about pathogens that could cause a pandemic. It represents a way to push people's thinking forward so that they're not wedded to lists of prior pandemic pathogens, like influenza."

He explained that it's more probable to be a virus capable of spreading easily. "There are definitely characteristics that would be likely - not every pathogen can cause a pandemic," Dr Adalja stated.

"In general, a few things need to be present. One, it's likely to be spread through respiration, because that's more efficient for a pathogen. People talking, laughing, coughing, sneezing - all of that is very hard for public health to intervene on, as we saw with COVID-19. It's likely to be a virus, not bacteria or fungus.

"It's likely to be something that could spill over from an animal species into a human. Or it could be a human pathogen that develops new characteristics or changes its genetics in such a way that makes it more conducive to causing a pandemic."

Speaking last year, Dr Adalja acknowledged that while we are "more prepared" now than we were before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we are not "fully prepared".