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New Zoonotic Human Pathogen: Canine Coronavirus (Malaysia; 2021)

EnolaGaia

I knew the job was dangerous when I took it ...
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A new coronavirus that can infect humans has been identified in samples from sick children in Malaysia. This one appears to be a mutated canine coronavirus.
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. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...-making-people-sick-and-it-s-coming-from-dogs
 
Do I need to stockpile hand disinfectant and toilet paper again?
 
I'll take my chances. I'd rather have a dog and risk it than live a sterile life.
Tealbed.jpg
 
Maybe we should simply acknowledge what vets have not told us many years , that germ distributers are good at spreading disease?

But germs are good for the immune system
 
More on animal to human SARS.

Only two new coronaviruses have spread globally the past 2 decades: SARS-CoV, which caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

But that may just be the tip of the iceberg of undetected infections with related viruses emerging from bats, a new paper claims. In a preprint published yesterday researchers estimate that an average of 400,000 people are likely infected with SARS-related coronaviruses every year, in spillovers that never grow into detectable outbreaks.

Although that number comes with big caveats, “It should be eye-opening to the entire scientific community that we don’t know very much about the frequency of zoonotic spillover,” says virologist Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan, who was not involved in the work. That needs to change, she says, “because otherwise we grossly underestimate it.”

The researchers, including Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance and Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, created a detailed map of the habitats of 23 bat species known to harbor SARS-related coronaviruses, the group to which SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 belong, and then overlaid it with data on where humans live to create a map of potential infection hot spots. They found that close to 500 million people live in areas where spillovers can occur, including northern India, Nepal, Myanmar, and most of Southeast Asia. The risk is highest in southern China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and on Java and other islands in Indonesia (see map, below).

https://www.science.org/content/art...ly_2021-09-15&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=3921081
 
The growing number of labs studying pathogens may result in more of these cases.

The number of high-containment labs studying the deadliest known pathogens is booming. A new analysis warns the growing number of labs is raising risks of an accidental release or misuse of germs such as the Ebola and Nipah viruses.

“The more labs and people working with dangerous pathogens, the risks go up,” says biosecurity expert Filippa Lentzos of King’s College London, who started the Global BioLabs mapping project 2 years ago with Gregory Koblentz of George Mason University.

Growth industry​

Europe has the most biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs, and three-quarters are in urban areas. (Ten existing labs without known start dates are not shown.)

total of 41 BSL-4 labs.(GRAPHIC) D. AN-PHAM/SCIENCE; (DATA) GLOBAL BIOLABS REPORT 2023, HTTPS://WWW.GLOBALBIOLABS.ORG
Worldwide, there are 51 biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs in 27 countries, according to the Global BioLabs Report 2023, which was released on 16 March. These labs have the highest level of safety and security standards, where workers often wear protective suits. Fifty-one is roughly double the number that existed about a decade ago. Many BSL-4 labs were built in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States to develop biodefense countermeasures and in response to the 2003 multicountry outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Three-quarters of the BSL-4 labs are in urban areas, creating risk for more people if a pathogen escaped.

Eighteen BSL-4 labs are slated to open in the next few years, most in Asian countries such as India and the Philippines, that want to bolster responses to local threats and future pandemics. The report also documented 57 operating BSL-3 “plus” labs, mainly in Europe, which are BSL-3 labs with extra safety and security measures. Researchers often use these labs to study animal pathogens such as highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...ty-pathogen-labs-around-world-raises-concerns
 
Maybe we should simply acknowledge what vets have not told us many years , that germ distributers are good at spreading disease?

But germs are good for the immune system
Unless they kill you or permanently damage you first.
 
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