Virus hunters identify two new pathogens in Myanmar
10 July 2018 • 5:28pm
Researchers have identified two new viruses in bats as part of a project to stop the next big disease outbreak in its tracks.
The race is on to identify “disease X”: the unknown pathogen
highlighted by the World Health Organization as having the potential to
spark a global pandemic.
Virus hunters with the US-based http://data.predict.global/" rel="nofollow - Predict project ,
funded by USAID, is trawling the animal kingdom to identify new viruses
with potential to spill over into the human population.
Now, scientists at the Smithsonian Institute in the United
States and University of California, Davis have identified two new
viruses in bats in Myanmar.
The
virus belongs to the coronavirus family, which includes two pathogens
that have already caused serious health outbreaks in the human
population: http://www.who.int/ith/diseases/sars/en/" rel="nofollow - Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) , which spread around the world in 2003, infecting around 8,000 people; and http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle-east-respiratory-syndrome-coronavirus-%28mers-cov%29" rel="nofollow - Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) , first identified in 2012 and which has a 35 per cent mortality rate.
However – despite being in the same family – the two new
viruses are not closely related to either SARS or MERS, say the
scientists who identified them.
The scientists took fecal and saliva samples from 150
animals and, so far, have found two positive matches for diseases with
the potential to jump to humans.
Marc
Valitutto, a wildlife vet with Smithsonian Conservation Biology
Institute’s Global Health Program, said: “Our goal is to look for a
pandemic virus, a virus that has the potential to have high mortality."
While he does not believe that the virus they have isolated
will turn into a pandemic he says that it is important to keep track of
them.
"We already know about viruses that have mutated like avian
influenza or swine it. It's a concern for us but right now it doesn't
seem that this virus will do that. Virologists would be able to
determine what level of mutation you would need for that to happen," he
said.
“We still have hundreds more samples to test and we expect that we will find more novel viruses.”
The team will now look at samples from people living in the area to
find out whether the virus has already made the jump to humans and what
the risks are for the disease to spread.
The Predict project is a forerunner of the bigger https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/29/scientists-hunt-diseases-x-y-z/" rel="nofollow - Global Virome Project – a
10-year plan to identify all the 1.67m unknown viruses in animals, some
800,000 of which researchers think have the potential to spread to
humans.
Africa
and Asia are seen as the most likely places from which viruses will
emerge as these are regions where humans are increasingly encroaching on
the animal environment.
Dr Valitutto said: “We are seeing once pristine forests
under threat for increased development, which brings wildlife in these
areas in close contact with humans."
One goal of the virus hunting research is to ensure that the forest is protected, said Dr Valitutto.
“Our concern is that if you use the forest for roads and
agriculture you disrupt the ecosystem. Animals will leave the forest and
be exposed to humans,” he added.
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