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We discovered a coronavirus similar to the covid-19 virus 7 years ago

2 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

tpmx 7y ago
MERS? (there's a paywall, so I'm just guessing here)
- tim333 7y ago
  Article text: We discovered a coronavirus similar to the covid-19 virus 7 years ago HEALTH 12 February 2020 By Debora MacKenzie New Scientist Default Image Remus86/Getty Images (a bat) THE Covid-19 coronavirus is similar to one detected in bats in China in 2013. But a failure to act on the warnings of those who studied it means we missed an opportunity to protect human health. While some are now saying the Covid-19 virus passed to humans from pangolins, it is likely that pangolins are merely victims of the infection, like us. “From the virology evidence available to date, the virus is almost certainly from a species of bat,” says Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London. For years, Zheng-Li Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been isolating coronaviruses from horseshoe bats in caves in China’s Yunnan province. In 2013, they found a coronavirus that could infect human cells in the lab. Last week, Shi reported that this virus is 96 per cent identical to the Covid-19 virus now spreading in people. In 2016, Wayne Marasco at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that the virus discovered by Shi’s team could replicate in human airway cells. They described it as being “poised for human emergence”. However, they say further research on this virus was hampered by the US government’s ban on work that alters viruses in ways that might make them more dangerous. Shi’s work has also revealed that viruses can pass directly from bats to people living near their caves. Her findings suggest we didn’t need pangolins to catch the Covid-19 virus, just as she previously revealed that SARS can come directly from bats without first infecting civets. “96% The similarity between Covid-19 virus and a virus found in 2013” Last year, Shi warned that it was highly likely coronavirus outbreaks would originate in bats in China. “The investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs,” she wrote. Now this opportunity has been missed, Shi has made a plea for increased efforts to develop drugs and vaccines.
koheripbal 7y ago
This was reported a few weeks ago, and there's a podcast (This Week In Virology) that goes into a little more detail - highly recommended. The researchers that mapped the virus were part of a team that was sent to collect samples from bats to help us identify and study viruses for the next SARS/MERS outbreak. Note that "similar" is far from meaning the "same" - it just means the closest match we've seen thus far, and therefore means it's very very likely to have also evolved from bats. ...and they did not test human virulence, so I think the notification n of "missed opportunity" here is a bit of a stretch.

2 points by sahin-boydas 7y ago

tpmx 7y ago

MERS? (there's a paywall, so I'm just guessing here)

tim333 7y ago
Article text: We discovered a coronavirus similar to the covid-19 virus 7 years ago HEALTH 12 February 2020 By Debora MacKenzie New Scientist Default Image Remus86/Getty Images (a bat) THE Covid-19 coronavirus is similar to one detected in bats in China in 2013. But a failure to act on the warnings of those who studied it means we missed an opportunity to protect human health. While some are now saying the Covid-19 virus passed to humans from pangolins, it is likely that pangolins are merely victims of the infection, like us. “From the virology evidence available to date, the virus is almost certainly from a species of bat,” says Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London. For years, Zheng-Li Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been isolating coronaviruses from horseshoe bats in caves in China’s Yunnan province. In 2013, they found a coronavirus that could infect human cells in the lab. Last week, Shi reported that this virus is 96 per cent identical to the Covid-19 virus now spreading in people. In 2016, Wayne Marasco at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that the virus discovered by Shi’s team could replicate in human airway cells. They described it as being “poised for human emergence”. However, they say further research on this virus was hampered by the US government’s ban on work that alters viruses in ways that might make them more dangerous. Shi’s work has also revealed that viruses can pass directly from bats to people living near their caves. Her findings suggest we didn’t need pangolins to catch the Covid-19 virus, just as she previously revealed that SARS can come directly from bats without first infecting civets. “96% The similarity between Covid-19 virus and a virus found in 2013” Last year, Shi warned that it was highly likely coronavirus outbreaks would originate in bats in China. “The investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs,” she wrote. Now this opportunity has been missed, Shi has made a plea for increased efforts to develop drugs and vaccines.

koheripbal 7y ago

This was reported a few weeks ago, and there's a podcast (This Week In Virology) that goes into a little more detail - highly recommended. The researchers that mapped the virus were part of a team that was sent to collect samples from bats to help us identify and study viruses for the next SARS/MERS outbreak. Note that "similar" is far from meaning the "same" - it just means the closest match we've seen thus far, and therefore means it's very very likely to have also evolved from bats. ...and they did not test human virulence, so I think the notification n of "missed opportunity" here is a bit of a stretch.