Scientists fear they have discovered the next big pandemic threat: a virus that lives in African monkeys.
Simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV) causes devastating Ebola-like symptoms, including internal bleeding and death.
It hijacks the immune system, disables vital defense mechanisms, and breaks the body apart cell by cell.
No human cases have been detected yet, but they are “ready for a spillover,” according to U.S. researchers.
By developing tests and monitoring the virus, “the global health community could potentially avert another pandemic,” they said.
Scientists fear they have discovered the next big pandemic threat: a virus that lives in African monkeys. Similar to Ebola virus (shown in stock image)
Experts at the University of Colorado Boulder are sounding alarm bells because of SHFV’s “human compatibility.”In lab studies, they found that the virus can easily hook onto human receptors and make copies of itself.
Experts at the University of Colorado Boulder are sounding alarm bells because of SHFV’s “human compatibility.”
Laboratory studies have found that the virus can easily hook onto human receptors and make copies of itself.
The study’s lead author, Dr. Sarah Sawyer, said: “This animal virus invades human cells, replicates itself, and evades some of the key immune mechanisms expected to protect us from animal viruses. I found a way.
“It’s pretty unusual. We have to pay attention to that.
In macaque monkeys, SHFV causes fever, fluid retention in body tissues, anorexia, and bleeding. The disease is usually fatal within about two weeks.
This virus was first sequenced in macaques in 1964 in US and Russian laboratories.
It appears to attack immune cells in the same way as HIV, a precursor derived from a type of chimpanzee in Africa.
Author Professor Cody Warren said:
Reservoirs of virus families including SHFV
“Just because we haven’t yet diagnosed human atelivirus infection doesn’t mean nobody has it. We’re not looking.
The researchers focused their work on a family of viruses called arteriviruses that typically circulate in pigs and horses but have been poorly studied in nonhuman primates.
They set their sights on the simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV), a type of sarterivirus that causes a deadly illness similar to Ebola virus disease.
It was sequenced in 1964 after a 1964 coincidence in Russian laboratories in the United States and the Soviet Union.
It has caused deadly outbreaks in colonies of captive macaque monkeys since the early 1960s.
Over the past decade, several scientists have searched for simian arteriviruses in nature.
A wide range of African monkeys are often asymptomatic and carry high viral load of aterivirus.
Researchers have yet to determine what the natural host species for SHFV are.
No human infections have yet been detected, according to a report published Friday in the scientific journal Cell.
The ability of pathogens to multiply rapidly within the body has echoes of coronaviruses.
Until winter 2019, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, had never been detected in humans.
It was a new virus thought to have jumped from bats to intermediate animals and spread to humans.
A never-before-seen virus destroyed the immune systems of inexperienced people and spread unabated for months.
The same thing could happen with another highly contagious new virus.
“COVID is the latest in a long series of animal-to-human spillover events, some of which have evolved into global catastrophes,” Dr. Sawyer said.
Covid’s ability to spread so easily among humans without hitherto detection has led many prominent scientists to believe it was the result of an accidental leak from the virology laboratory in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Covid pandemic. I doubted if there was.
