A new coronavirus has been detected in Malaysia and many scientists point to this as a worrying trend as it is infectious and originates from dogs. According to the experts, it is not necessary to worry, or to abandon our pets, as the tendency was at the beginning of the pandemic. This is a specific case due to a virus found in Malaysia.
New infectious coronavirus from dogs detected in Malaysia
New coronaviruses have emerged in animals with remarkable regularity over the past 20 years. In 2002, Sars-COV moved from civets to humans.
Ten years later, Mers originated in camels. Then, SARS-COV-2 began spreading worldwide in 2019.
For many scientists, they point to this pattern a worrying trend: coronavirus outbreaks are not rare events, but will likely occur every decade.
Now scientists report that they have discovered what could be the latest coronavirus to move from animals to people. And it comes from dogs.
When the COVID–19 pandemic originated, Dr. Gregory Gray began to probe whether there might be more cases of coronaviruses that were harming humans and threatening to spark another outbreak.
The problem was that he had no tool to look for them. The Covid 19 test, he says, is extremely limited. It indicates whether there is a specific virus, SARS COV-2, in a person’s respiratory tract and nothing else.
“This type of test usually focuses on known viruses because the diagnostics are so specific,” says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute.
So he demanded from a graduate student in his lab, Leshan Xiu, a more powerful test that would work like Covid 19, but could recognize all coronaviruses, even unknown ones.
Xiu not only accepted the challenge, but the collected tool he created performed better than expected.
In the first batch of samples tested last year, Gray and Xiu found an entirely new coronavirus associated with pneumonia in hospitalized patients, mainly children.
This virus may be the eighth coronavirus known to cause disease in humans, the team reports Thursday in the journal clinical infectious diseases.
The samples came from patients at a hospital in Sarawak, Malaysia, that was recorded by an employee 2017 and 2018
The patients had what appeared to be normal pneumonia. But in eight of 301 samples tested, they found that the patients had airways infected with a new coronavirus.
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