Seven scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and Chinese military researchers have conducted experiments and co-authored six studies on infectious diseases
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All major labs in the world work with each other. North Carolina worked with Wuhan's Bat Lady on.
SARS-like virus in bats shows potential to infect humans, study finds
By Helen Branswell Nov. 9, 2015
Viruses that are related to SARS and that are found in some species of bats could become a source of future human outbreaks, according to a
new study released Monday. And it appears that there are fewer barriers to that spillover than scientists initially thought.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said a virus in the same family as SARS — severe acute respiratory syndrome — appears to be able to infect human respiratory tract cells. The finding came as a surprise because the team thought the virus would have had to go through a process known as adaptation — meaning it would have had to acquire the ability to infect human cells by first learning how to infect the cells of another mammal.
It’s believed that is how SARS went from being a bat virus to a major international outbreak that infected 8,400 people in 2003, killing at least 916 of them. In the case of SARS, the virus was probably passed from bats to palm civets and from palm civets to people.
The new study was published in the journal Nature Medicine.
The UNC scientists wanted to see if cousin viruses — coronaviruses that are carried by Chinese horseshoe bats — also posed a threat to people. They used one, SHC014, as a representative of the group.
They inserted a key part of the virus, its spike protein, into a SARS virus and then ran experiments to see if the hybrid virus could infect human respiratory tract cells (in a dish) and mice that were vulnerable to the SARS virus.
It did.
“I think the existence of viruses that can jump directly is the important part, that was unanticipated,” lead author Vineet Menachery, who researches viral immunology, told STAT in an interview.
“Based on what was known in the literature, we would have expected that viruses coming out of bats would have needed that one-in-million mutation.”
Another coronavirus expert, Dr. Stanley Perlman at the University of Iowa, suggested the paper was a useful investigation. But he noted the hybrid virus was attenuated — weakened — and said the virus would probably need to adapt more in people before it could spread widely.
He and his co-authors noted they had to stop some of their work because of US government policies. The US has a moratorium on so-called gain-of-function research, which includes some research that enhances the ability of a pathogen such as a virus to infect people or spread among them.
A cousin of the SARS coronavirus appears to be able to infect human respiratory tract cells — which came as a surprise to the scientists who tested the bat virus.
www.statnews.com
So, did Americans back in 2015 (actually earlier as that was the date the paper was released) make the virus we now have?