New Coronavirus Detected In Patients At Malaysian Hospital; The Source May Be Dogs
In the past 20 years, new coronaviruses have emerged from animals with remarkable regularity. In 2002, SARS-CoV jumped from civets into people. Ten years later, MERS emerged from camels. Then in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 began to spread around the world.
For many scientists, this pattern points to a disturbing trend: Coronavirus outbreaks aren't rare events and will likely occur every decade or so.
Now, scientists are reporting that they have discovered what may be the latest coronavirus to jump from animals into people. And it comes from a surprising source: dogs.
When the COVID-19 pandemic first exploded, Dr. Gregory Gray started to wonder whether there might be other coronaviruses out there ...
The problem was that he didn't have a tool to look for them. The test for COVID-19, he says, is extremely limited. It tells whether one particular virus — SARS-CoV-2 — is present in a person's respiratory tract, and nothing else. ...
So he challenged a graduate student in his lab, Leshan Xiu, to make a more powerful test — one that would work like a COVID-19 test but could detect all coronaviruses, even the unknown ones.
Xiu not only rose to the challenge, but the tool he created worked better than expected. ...
In the first batch of samples tested last year, Gray and Xiu found evidence of an entirely new coronavirus associated with pneumonia in hospitalized patients — mostly in kids. This virus may be the eighth coronavirus known to cause disease in people ...
The samples came from patients at a hospital in Sarawak, Malaysia, taken by a collaborator in 2017 and 2018. ...
The patients had what looked like regular pneumonia. But in eight out of 301 samples tested, or 2.7%, Xiu and Gray found that the patients' upper respiratory tracts were infected with a new canine coronavirus, i.e., a dog virus. ...
To find out, he sent the patients' samples over to a world expert on animal coronaviruses at Ohio State University. She was also dubious. "I thought, 'There's something wrong,' " says virologist Anastasia Vlasova. "Canine coronaviruses were not thought to be transmitted to people. It's never been reported before." ...
"We did discover a very, very unique mutation — or deletion — in the genome," Vlasova says. That specific deletion, she says, isn't present in any other known dog coronaviruses, but it is found somewhere else: in human coronaviruses. "It's a mutation that's very similar to one previously found in the SARS coronavirus and in [versions of] SARS-CoV-2 ... [that appeared] very soon after its introduction into the human population" ...
This deletion, she believes, helps the dog virus infect or persist inside humans. And it may be a key step required for coronaviruses to make the jump into people. ...
