2022 has been a banner year for global infectious disease spread — and it's not just COVID.

First, there were the reports of little kids with mysterious and life-threatening liver failure across the US and Europe. Then monkeypox cases surged across the globe like never before.

Meningitis has killed at least a dozen people in Florida this year, according to state epidemiologists, while a fatal parechovirus infected newborns across several states — at least one baby died in Connecticut. In Australia and Belgium, diphtheria made a comeback, and cases of the Marburg virus are being identified for the first time ever in Ghana.

Then, just last week, New York City announced that there is polio in its wastewater, mirroring a highly unusual trend picked up in London's sewers in the spring.


"It's like all the biblical plagues are coming back, right?" Dr. Madhukar Pai, a global health expert at McGill, told Insider.

It didn't happen overnight, and it's not a direct result of the pandemic either, but disease experts agree: the pace of these infectious outbreaks is quickening.

Pai and other top-tier experts say there is no single, "simplistic" explanation. Instead, there is a wide web of at least seven powerful, interwoven issues undergirding the trend.

"It's definitely not something that we hoped would happen in public health, but it's also a situation which we feared might happen," Dr. Jay Varma, an expert in disease control and prevention at Cornell, said. "If you think about it almost like a sports event, the offense has gotten more intense — if you consider the viruses and pathogens that are out there — and our defense has weakened at the same time."