The growth of superbugs and the threat of climate change and air pollution should be the top research priorities of the scientific community, a survey canvassing people’s attitudes to global health threats has found.

Earlier this year the World Health Organization listed the 10 greatest health threats facing the world and set out how to tackle them in its five-year plan.

The list – which WHO did not put in any order of priority – included infectious diseases such as Ebola, influenza and HIV but also showed that environmental threats and non-communicable diseases such as cancer and diabetes were becoming equally urgent.

Also on the list was antimicrobial resistance (AMR) - the increasing number of infections which are becoming resistant to antibiotics – and vaccine hesitancy – the refusal of or mistrust of vaccines.

In a poll by YouGov 2,000 adults were asked to decide which issues on WHO’s list should be tackled by the scientific community.