A new human coronavirus from dogs has been discovered in Malaysia. The emergence of animal coronaviruses that also infect humans will become more and more common in the future, scientists warn.
Only seven human coronaviruses and more than a hundred animal specimens are currently known. Over the past 20 years in particular, a striking number of human coronaviruses have emerged. For example, SARS-CoV originated from civets and MERS originated from camels. The most recent coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is also known to us, but the source of it is still unclear.
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Currently, only seven human coronaviruses and more than a hundred animal specimens are known. Over the past 20 years in particular, a striking number of human coronaviruses have emerged. For example, SARS-CoV originated from civets and MERS originated from camels. The most recent coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is also known to us, but the source of it is still unclear. Scientists predict that such spillovers from animal to human will occur just about every decade in the future. The more we search for it, the more we will find, and that may be happening more often than we would like. According to Science magazine, a new human coronavirus has been found in Malaysia that has jumped from a dog. Thanks to a test that can detect all coronaviruses, including the unknown ones, scientists discovered a completely new coronavirus in samples from a few years ago. in hospitalized patients – especially children – with pneumonia. It turned out to be a canine coronavirus (CCV). It is the first reported case of a CCV that can replicate in humans. According to Ohio State University veterinary virologist Anastasia Vlasova and lead author of the study, human infections from canine coronaviruses are much more common than we first thought. , had also once infected cats and pigs, but the vast majority of the genome was similar to that of canine coronaviruses. The genome analysis also showed a mutation that is not present in other known canine coronaviruses, but is present in human coronaviruses. The mutation is very similar to a mutation that also occurs in SARS viruses and in certain variants of SARS-CoV-2. This mutation would allow the dog virus to infect humans. But whether CCoV-HuPn-2018 will trigger another pandemic is unlikely. After all, there is no evidence that the virus can spread from person to person. So it may be that the virus has made a dead end jump. But it is also unclear how the patients became infected or whether they had direct contact with infected animals. Most of the patients lived in rural areas in Borneo, where they may have been exposed to wild animals frequently. The new coronavirus also belongs to the alpha group, which also includes two known human coronaviruses (CoV-229E and CoV-OC43). They just cause the common cold. So it could be that humans already have some immunity to this new virus from repeated exposure to the other two. The more dangerous viruses are beta viruses, including SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV. “This may be the eighth coronavirus that causes an infection in humans,” say the scientists in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. But according to other scientists, it is too early to draw this conclusion. The authors of the paper have not yet been able to prove the Kochs postulates (to determine whether a particular germ is the cause of a particular disease, ed.), Says Xumin Zhang, virologist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. news site NPR. To do that, they would have to inject the virus into humans to see if it reproduces the disease. Of course we cannot do that. ‘ What is possible is to see how common the virus is in people with pneumonia and test it on mice or other animals. Zhang wouldn’t be surprised if this canine virus turned out to be a new human pathogen. “I believe there are a lot of animal coronaviruses that can pass to humans.” He says scientists need to do more research into these hidden infections in humans before they become a bigger problem and potentially trigger another corona pandemic.
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