A Dataset of Search Interests related to Disease X originating from different Geographic Regions

Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. The WHO adopted the placeholder name to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen (e.g., broader vaccines and manufacturing facilities). The Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at that time, Anthony Fauci, stated that the concept of Disease X would encourage WHO projects to focus their research efforts on entire classes of viruses (e.g., flaviviruses), instead of just individual strains (e.g., zika virus), thus improving WHO capability to respond to unforeseen strains. This dataset presents the search interests related to Disease X originating from 94 geographic regions between February 2018 to August 2023.