The Covid-19 pandemic has not served as a lesson in preventing future zoonotic diseases, warns an international team of researchers who identified several dangerous viruses in fur farms in China.
Among these viruses, a coronavirus that has been shown to affect humans has been detected in nocturnal animals, animals raised in Asia for their fur and meat, and has been linked to some of the first cases of Covid-19 in China in 2019.
The study published in the scientific journal Nature He also discovered another coronavirus, related to the one that caused MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), in minks raised not only in Asia but also in Europe, mainly for their fur.
“Asia is one of the most active regions in the world in the fur production and trade process. However, little is known about the viruses circulating in fur-bearing animals in the region,” Suo Su of Fudan University, who is the study’s lead author, said on his website. Science.
The concentration of large numbers of animals in closed facilities provides favorable conditions for the spread of viruses, the researchers note.
The night owl (Nyctereutes procyonoides) was one of the animals in the study (Wikimedia Commons)
Suo and his team analyzed samples from 461 fur-bearing animals that died of disease on various farms in China from 2021 to 2023. In addition to nocturnals and minks, they also looked at other categories of carnivores popular in the fur trade, such as red and arctic foxes.
Samples from animals raised for fur, meat or medicinal purposes, such as deer, muskrats, guinea pigs, rabbits and badgers, were also analyzed.
The researchers identified a total of 39 viruses considered to pose a “high risk” of transmission to other species and possibly to humans, with mink coronavirus being the most worrying example.
In addition, these animals tested positive for several viruses that infect humans, such as influenza, hepatitis E, Japanese encephalitis and gastroenteritis. The greatest variety of pathogenic viruses was observed in guinea pigs and carnivores, the researchers report.
The results show that the risk of a new pandemic remains: “Every virus we discover is a new risk. At some point, something undesirable can happen,” warns Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney, a member of the research team.
Virologist Marion Koopmans of Erasmus University Amsterdam, who was not involved in the research, said the findings provide “another reason to treat fur farms as a public health threat and to regulate and monitor them more carefully.”
