Where do new viruses like coronavirus come from?

As the virus leaps from animals to humans, factors smaller than cells and as large as planets are in play.

According to best-selling author and scientific journalist David Kummen, the question of how that happened with SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 is important for several reasons. The answer may help scientists find a vaccine to end this pandemic. You can find out how to prevent the following:

And, according to him and other experts, even if you live far away from where the virus appears, prevention needs to understand your role, no matter where you are. As Kuanmen says: “Everything we do, eat, buy, consume and recreate Dangerous virus This means everyone has the opportunity to join the solution.

You can write a book about the myriad ways animals, humans, and viruses interact. I’m sorry. Released in 2012, the Spillover warned about a pandemic outbreak much like COVID-19.

Not all human viruses are of animal origin. But some of the most notorious, including West Nile and HIV have. Still, Virus To make such a leap, said Raina Plowright, an associate professor of epidemiology at Montana State University in Bonaman.

The virus is everywhere, she said. A walk can inhale them from plants, soil, birds and even pets. Most do no harm. They are killed by the mucus in our airways, or the acid in our stomach. Alternatively, they cannot bind to our cells and regenerate.

Plowrite describes many of these barriers as a series of walls stacked like Swiss cheese: all holes must be in exact alignment for something to pass through.

Animals that carry the virus are called reservoir hosts. They act as a kind of viral warehouse. From time to time, viruses can ride on so-called insects, often known as vectors, to reach humans from the host. One example is a mosquito that spreads the West Nile virus from birds to people.

Often, spillover or zoonosis viruses get help from a species of intermediary called an amp.

For example, new flu often begins in wild waterfowl. They may first spill on domestic birds, poultry, chickens, ducks, they may share farms with pigs. Pigs can hide Human flu And, as Kuenmen says, it acts as a place for viral genes to “mix”.

If the mixture causes mutations that transmit the virus from animal to human and give it an easy way to fly between people, the virus suddenly has billions of potential hosts worldwide. Said. “It’s a virus that won an evolutionary prize.”

SARS-CoV-2 is Bat.. That Genetic fingerprint It suggests that researchers in China have evolved similar to the virus they warned in 2017.

Bats have been the storage host for several deadly viruses in the last few decades and are a specialty of plowrites. She appears in Quan Men’s book for her work on the Hendra virus, which killed horses and humans in Australia.

Bats have some amazing adaptations that can host the virus without harm, she said. However, these viruses often require an amplifier to penetrate humans. Such a relationship can occur if there are bats that carry the infectious virus near other animals in a crowded wildlife market. It’s not clear if that happened with SARS-CoV-2, she said.

However, such interactions need not be exotic. In the Hendra virus, for example, a horse picked it up from the grass under a tree that was fed by bats and spread it to human caretakers.

Intimacy is important. “It’s not dangerous if the bats shed the pathogen in the middle of a forest without humans,” Plowrite said. But if the bat sheds the virus in a town or market, it does.

And here’s how humans can help: “We are changing the environment rapidly and our contact with bats rapidly,” she said.

Development brings humans closer to bats and robs them of food. She said stressed and hungry bats are more susceptible to the virus. You may also go to find something to eat nearby.

Quammen, who is working on a book on COVID-19, said modern travel is another way for humans to ease their viral lives. Bat dens in the countryside of China are just a short flight from Los Angeles and London. As one expert told him, “sickness everywhere is sick everywhere.”

He also said he could find risk factors in his pocket. Mobile phones require a mineral called coltan, which is mainly mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Miners working there need to eat, but their only protein can come from the hunting bushmeat of monkeys, rodents, bats and more. “Bingo,” said Quan Meng. “You have contact between humans and wildlife.”

Plowright agrees that if people want to participate in the prevention of the next pandemic, they need to think about such connections.

each Human Every time we encounter a wildlife, and every time we jump into their space, we are a roll of dice about whether to stir the dangerous virus.

“We’re rolling the dice thousands of times per second right now,” Plowright said.

American Heart Association News Covers heart and brain health. Not all views expressed in this story reflect the official position of the American Heart Association. Copyrights are owned or held by the American Heart Association, Inc. and all rights are reserved.