Researchers at Duke University in the United States have identified a new coronavirus in a boy with pneumonia in Malaysia in 2018 that could have passed from one dog to another. If the finding is confirmed, CCoV-HuPn-2018, as they have called it, could become the eighth coronavirus that causes disease in humans and show that these pathogens are transmitted from animals to people more frequently than previously believed. This is the first report of a novel canine-feline recombinant alphacoronavirus isolated from a patient with human pneumonia.
“No one knows how common this virus is and whether it can be transmitted efficiently from dogs to humans, or between humans,” said Gregory Gray, professor of medicine, global health and environmental health at Duke University and lead of the study. which adds: “What is more important is that these coronaviruses are likely to be transmitted to humans from animals much more frequently than we know”, and points out that “we are missing them because most hospital diagnostic tests they only detect known human coronaviruses.”
Diagnostic tools like this have the potential to identify new animal viruses that affect people before they can trigger a pandemic.
A team of scientists in which Gray worked together with visiting professor Leshan Xiu, developed in 2020 a molecular diagnostic tool that made it possible to detect most of the coronaviruses of the Coronaviridae family to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs, responsible for the COVID-19. With this tool, they analyzed 301 cases of pneumonia that were archived and collected signs of canine coronaviruses in eight people with pneumonia hospitalized in Sarawak, a state located in eastern Malaysia. According to Gray, diagnostic tools like the one they have developed to find this virus have the potential to identify other new viruses that affect people before they can trigger a pandemic.
Monitor areas where humans and animals intersect
In an investigation published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, scientists from the state of Ohio, led by Anastasia N. Vlasova, grew a virus from one of the clinical samples and through a detailed genome reconstruction process were able to identify it as a new canine coronavirus . Gray says that “there are probably multiple canine coronaviruses circulating and spreading to humans that we don’t know about,” and believes that Sarawak could be an ideal place to detect them because it is an equatorial area with rich biodiversity.
“These pathogens do not cause a pandemic overnight, they take many years to adapt to the human immune system and cause infections”
This expert considers it necessary to establish “better surveillance where humans and animals intersect, and among people who are sick enough to be hospitalized for new viruses” because this will help mitigate the threat of viruses that jump from animal species. to human beings.
“These pathogens don’t cause a pandemic overnight,” says Gray, but “it takes many years for them to adapt to the human immune system and cause infection, and then become efficient at person-to-person transmission. We need to look for these pathogens and detect them early.”
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