‘The more that we disrupt ecosystems and allow new mixing of species and viruses, the more we spin nature’s roulette wheel.’
They just found one. And it’sIn 2020, a team of Russian scientists collected a few horseshoe bats in Sochi National Park in southern Russia. The Russians identified, in those bats, a new virus they called Khosta-2. Behaviorally, the virus seemed to have a lot in common with SARS-CoV-2.
“We tested how well the spike proteins from these bat viruses infect human cells under different conditions,” the scientists wrote. “We found that the spike from the virus Khosta-2 could infect [the] cells, similar to human pathogens using the same entry mechanisms.” Like SARS-CoV-2 and the hundreds of other so-called sarbecoviruses, Khosta-2 uses that spike-shaped protein on its surface to grab onto and infect a host’s cells. But the vast majority of sarbecoviruses can only infect the species that are their usual hosts. Bats, typically.is that, like SARS-CoV-2, it can also infect people—in lab conditions, at least. What makes Khosta-2 particularly scary
So don’t panic quite yet. There are a lot of animal viruses, many of which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2 or at least use some of the same biological mechanisms to infect their hosts. Most have never infected a human being—and might not even be able to do so in real-world conditions outside of a lab.
“Generally, we might be able to say zoonosis risk is increasing for many types of viruses,” Letko said. Consider the recent history of infectious diseases in the human population. SARS-CoV-2 is just theThere’s every reason to fear the pandemicCOVID-19. Maybe Khosta-2 will be the virus that gets us next. Maybe it’ll be some other pathogen. “The more that we disrupt ecosystems and allow new mixing of species and viruses, the more we spin nature’s roulette wheel,” Lawler said.
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