Since the early 1990s, novel diseases have increased; this includes the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia that was discovered in 1999, the SARS outbreak in China (which expanded to a few other countries) in 2003, the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, the MERS disease in Western Asia beginning in 2012, the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa since 2014, and the Zika epidemic in South America that began in 2016. In the fall of 2019, the first major pandemic of the 21st century, known as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, began in central China and spread all over the world in the four months that followed.