Two More Coronaviruses Can Infect People, Studies Suggest: Science Magazine
'Two more coronaviruses can infect people, studies suggest,' By Anthony King, Science Magazine, May 20, 2021.
Eight children hospitalized with pneumonia in Malaysia several years ago had evidence of infections with a novel coronavirus similar to one found in dogs, a research team reports today. Only seven coronaviruses were previously known to infect people, the latest being SARS-CoV-2, the spark of the COVID-19 pandemic. The discovery of this likely new human pathogen, along with the report of an instance of a coronavirus that appears to have jumped from pigs to people many years ago, could significantly expand which members of the viral family pose another global threat.
“I think the more we look, the more we will find that these coronaviruses are crossing species everywhere,” says Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa who was not involved in the new work.
The researchers have not definitely linked either new virus to human disease. And there’s no evidence that the two new coronaviruses can transmit between people—each infection may have been a dead-end jump into a person from a nonhuman host. But many researchers worry the viruses may evolve that ability within a person or the animals they normally infect. A complete genome sequence of the virus found in one Malaysian patient, reported today in Clinical Infectious Diseases, reveals a chimera of genes from four coronaviruses: two previously identified canine coronaviruses, one known to infect cats, and what looks like a pig virus.
This is the first report suggesting a caninelike coronavirus can replicate in people, and further studies will need to confirm the ability. The researchers have grown the virus in dog tumor cells but not yet in human cells.
Unlike with SARS-CoV-2 and other known human coronaviruses, “We don’t have any clear evidence that this particular [coronavirus] strain is better adapted to humans because of its spike structure,” says veterinary virologist Anastasia Vlasova of Ohio State University (OSU), Wooster, lead author of the study. Human infections from dog coronaviruses may occur “at a much higher frequency than we previously thought,” she adds. This particular virus might not transmit between people, but we don’t know that for sure, Vlasova cautions.
The 8 children whose tissue samples Vlasova and her colleagues studied were mainly living in traditional longhouses or villages in rural or suburban Sarawak on Borneo, where they likely had frequent exposure to domestic animals and jungle wildlife. They were among 301 hospitalized pneumonia patients during 2017–18 and the researchers screened their nasopharyngeal samples—tissue from the upper part of the throat—for a large variety of human and nonhuman coronaviruses...
More, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/two-more-coronaviruses-can-infect-people-studies-suggest
- An electron microscopic image of a new caninelike coronavirus isolated from a child in Malaysia with pneumonia and grown in dog cells. (Molecular and Cellular Imaging Center/Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Ohio State Univ.).
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Also,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/5/22/2031645/-Two-new-coronaviruses-have-been-identified-that-can-infect-people-and-one-came-from-dogs
= new reply since forum marked as read
... most of humanity eventually? Then patient zero will probably say that animals are better than people anyway.
I sincerely hope that never happens, and there's little point in speculating about it too much other than to satisfy my sometimes-dark sense of humor.
