5 ms·
I think that "only 250 virus infect humans" means something like "so far, we only know of 250 viruses in record that cause notable diseases". In an ideal world
by dsign 7y ago
I think that "only 250 virus infect humans" means something like "so far, we only know of 250 viruses in record that cause notable diseases".
In an ideal world, we should be sequencing viruses for each single patient, just like we measure blood pressure.
- alexpotato 7y agoAlong these lines, I wonder if we will eventually see charts like this for ALL human viruses with a person by person trace: https://nextstrain.org/ncov https://nextstrain.org/ncov
- sjg007 7y agoYes we will
- Ericson2314 7y agoWhy so confident? We have the technical skills, but this also takes institutional cooperation we suck at. We don't even have a standard format for conventional medical records in the US!
- sjg007 7y agoI expect legislation that will require CDC and DHHS to establish surveillance programs. We will be sequencing. This will be academic labs and clinic labs most likely. There might be a national sequencing center established. If we work together with China we might leverage their massive sequencing capacity.
- leoedin 7y agoThat chart is fascinating - especially the extent of which some countries apparently have virus strains from every branch, while others have 1 or 2 distinct lineages (Washington State being the biggest one). That does imply that the UK and Netherlands have seen the virus introduced from many sources, which suggests much more widespread transmission than eg New Zealand, which appears to have one lineage. However, there's probably a huge sampling bias present. Hopefully we can keep doing this sort of genetic lineage testing at greater rates - it's incredibly informative on how it spreads.
- wbazant 7y agoAs long as it doesn't involve a lung biopsy for each patient :$
- wbl 7y agoSequencing has gotten really cheap.
- aledalgrande 7y agoA nanomachine swimming around your veins will signal back to your Apple Watch 10 what new viruses you got ;-)
- koeng 7y agoI'm pretty sure you could simply mine microbiome data. They have lots publicly available.
- W4ldi 7y agoI don't think the existing viruses that infect humans are so important. The problem is rather mutation - or evolution - any virus that at the moment does not affect humans can suddenly develop into one that infects humans, and this is how COVID-19 started. Land living animals are the greatest risk here because their bodies essentially work the same as humans and farming them increases the amount of viruses and thus the potential for a mutation to spread fast.
- logfromblammo 7y agoThere are plenty of viruses that still do something, but we don't know what it is, because the something is not immediately threatening to public health. For instance, there is a chicken virus (SMAM-1) that unconditionally increases adiposity in the infected bird, even when the chicken is fed the same amount as inunfected chickens. SMAM-1 is zoonotic to humans. It also makes them fat. Several human adenoviruses are suspected of doing similar things. But they have not been studied extensively, because the general prejudice is that people become morbidly obese due to their own lifestyle choices, and therefore excessive adiposity is a condition that should be first-treated with lifestyle intervention, rather than applying evidence-based medicine. There are still a lot of nonscientific prejudices in general medicine. "Let's sequence all viruses in our patients," sounds a whole lot like "let's wash our hands before touching a new patient, so we don't spread diseases between them," which was once rejected by the experts as implausible hogwash.