A new coronavirus that normally infects dogs was found in Malaysian pneumonia patients

A new type of coronavirus that can infect humans has been identified in at least one pneumonia patient hospitalized in Sarawak, Malaysia in 2018, a medical journal reports.

The virus was the first canine coronavirus isolated from human patients, according to a journalized paper by an international team of scientists, including scientists from the United States, Malaysia, and China. Clinical infections On thursday.

According to Dr. Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University, the virus was discovered in a project by researchers at Duke University and Malaysia to study the causes of pneumonia and build virus detection capabilities in Sarawak.

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“Until now, we didn’t know that the canine alpha coronavirus mates the species to humans,” Gray said.

“This suggests that there is no chance to detect the pre-pandemic virus because there is no diagnosis to detect the new coronavirus in a typical hospital laboratory.”

According to Gray, the study also showed a new approach to detecting the virus and preventing it from evolving into a pandemic-causing virus.

For example, instead of collecting as much coronavirus as possible in a bat cave, as some coronavirus researchers are currently doing, Gray says that pathogen monitoring has a high level of human-animal interaction. The animals have already spilled into human populations, saying that the area where the virus originates should be focused.

According to Gray, if the canine coronavirus infection spreads, it will be the eighth unique coronavirus that infects humans, following the common cold, severe acute respiratory syndrome and coronavirus that causes Covid-19. There is a possibility.

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There are four genera or categories in the coronavirus family, and alphacoronavirus and betacoronavirus infect a variety of mammals. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 fall into the betacoronavirus group. Alpha coronavirus mainly infects cats and dogs. Both categories are derived from the bat viral gene pool.

According to Gray, 301 pneumonia patients admitted to Shiv and Capito hospitals in 2017 and 2018 were tested with a pan-coronavirus polymerase chain reaction diagnostic tool and samples of eight patients were tested for coronavirus. It is said that a signal was obtained.

Canine coronavirus propagated normally from a sample of an infant patient about 5 months old, and genome sequencing became possible. According to Gray, the strain was named CCoV-HuPn-2018.

Toh Teck Hock, a pediatrician and head of the clinical research center at Sibu Hospital, said that patients are primarily Sarawak indigenous peoples and live in rural and suburban row houses and villages where human-animal interactions are frequent. Said.

Seven of the eight patients were children. One was an adult. Since they came to hospitals from different areas at different times, the virus was unlikely to be transmitted among them. All patients showed symptoms of pneumonia with fever, cough, and breathing problems. According to Toh, some were wearing oxygen ventilators.

“Fortunately, they all recovered in the hospital a few days later,” Toh said.

The sequence of the new canine coronavirus showed some features indicating that it was in the process of adapting to humans: it has some inheritance similar to that found in SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. Had a change. Anastasia Urassowa, an assistant professor at The Ohio State University who analyzed the virus, said the genome shows signs of recombination that include not only canine coronavirus but also cat sequences.

“Coronaviruses frequently exchange genetic components, allowing some of them to adapt better to humans. I don’t know if it will be an epidemic virus, but this is more contagious. It can be expensive and becoming a more serious pathogen, “says Vlasova.

Gray sought a more practical way to study the coronavirus, perhaps by focusing on what has already spilled on humans, by examining people exposed to bats and other animals that carry the virus.

He said the problem with the current approach of collecting as many viruses as possible is that it is difficult to know which ones can spread to humans, yet years before they are fully adapted to humans. He said it could happen.

John Rednicky, a professor of microbiology at the University of Florida, is doing a similar study to identify the potential for new coronavirus infections in humans, and virology studies need to be more aggressive, Gray said. I agreed.

“It’s very important to develop a way to monitor the situation. What happens is that many people wait until they get infected and then react to it like Covid-19,” Lednicky said. .. Position..

“Maybe this canine coronavirus has been around for a long time, but it didn’t make people sick. But now Gray’s team has isolated it from the sick. This is the virus. Is it the time when is a serious problem? “

Research on canine alpha coronavirus has been limited. For example, the presence of the virus in the patient’s respiratory tract may not mean that pneumonia was caused by it, as there was evidence of other viral infections.

Gray said he plans more follow-up, including taking blood samples to search for antibody evidence of the infection. The team was also investigating the causes of pneumonia in other countries such as China, Sri Lanka and Vietnam to see if other new viruses could be detected.

“To reduce the risk of these viruses adapting to humans and streamlining human-to-human transmission, we need to change our surveillance strategies,” Gray said.

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