A few months after the covid-19 pandemic struck in the spring of 2020, a research group in the United States started a project to develop new methods for finding as yet unknown disease-causing viruses that are at risk of spreading between humans.
Today, there are seven known coronaviruses that can cause disease in humans, all of which were discovered by chance when they had already spread in society.
Early start
"But if we can find new viruses at risk of causing disease in humans at an early stage, we can get an early start and start developing vaccines and antiviral drugs and then we could avoid such a devastating pandemic," says Gregory Gray, a professor of infectious diseases at Duke. university to SVT.
A doctoral student Gregory Grays' new project therefore went through nose samples taken from 301 patients who were treated for pneumonia at a hospital in the state of Sarawak in Malaysia in 2018. He discovered that seven children and an adult woman were infected with a completely new virus, a so-called alfacoronavirus that came from a canine virus.
- We were very surprised.
It is the first evidence that an alpha-coronavirus from a dog has infected a human, says Gregory Gray.
Two dogs, a cat and a pig
The research group succeeded in reading the virus genome.
It turned out to consist of a combination of four different types of coronavirus.
Two virus strains originated from dogs, one from a cat and one from a pig.
The new alpha-corona virus was named CCov-HuPn-2018.
The discovery has been published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
- This finding confirms that viruses that come from animals constantly challenge our immune system, but it is probably unusual for them to also start spreading between humans, says Gregory Gray.
All the patients in Sarawak recovered from the pneumonia, but Gregory Gray can not yet determine if it was really the new coronavirus that made them sick, but it is important to investigate in order to stop a possible spread of the new canine coronavirus.
"There are probably many viruses out there that we constantly miss and we should build a surveillance system that can give us early warnings for pathogenic viruses that can lead to a pandemic," says Gregory Gray, giving another example where it was discovered by chance. that children have become infected with a new virus.
Pig breeding in the USA
Just a few months ago, a research group at the University of Florida published an as-yet unexplored study that showed that three children in Haiti became infected with a delta coronavirus between 2014 and 2015. Delta coronavirus has never been seen in humans before and this particular strain originated from a pig breeding in the United States that had previously had an outbreak among the animals.
- I believe that monitoring should focus on areas where many animals and people meet, such as in industrial animal husbandry in the western world. Sampling of both animals and people working in the animal industry can give early warning signals, says Gregory Gray.