New virus with potential to spark another pandemic discovered in bats in South America
A new coronavirus has been found in Brazil that shares key features with the one that sparked the global Covid pandemic.
Scientists in the US and Japan detected the strain after capturing bats living in the north of Brazil and swabbing their intestines.
Named BRZ batCoV, the virus is strikingly similar to the one that sparked the pandemic, raising fears that history could repeat itself barely three years after the worst was declared over.
Analysis showed it was a betacoronavirus, or part of the same group that includes SARS-CoV-2, MERS and the SARS virus that emerged in 2003.
It was also found to have a furin cleavage site, the part of the virus that makes it good at infecting people, that differed from the site in Sars-CoV-2 by just one amino acid.
No human infections have been reported with the virus, found in a small insect-eating bat common in South America.
But the researchers said the findings showed how it was possible for a new coronavirus to emerge in nature with the potential to spread to humans.
Writing in their paper, which was published as a pre-print and has not been reviewed by other scientists, they said: ‘[This] further highlights the role of bats as potential reservoirs… relevant to zoonotic emergence [when a virus jumps from animals to humans].’
Shown above is virologist Shi Zhengli, known as ‘Batwoman’, with many experts suggesting that the virus behind the Covid pandemic escaped from her lab in Wuhan, China
Pictured above is the bat specimen in which the new coronavirus was identified
‘Given the importance of the furin cleavage site… this finding provides important insights into the evolutionary potential and zoonotic risk of BRZ batCoV.’
MERS is a contagious respiratory illness that spread from animals to humans and from human to human in 2012 in the Middle East. It causes fever, shortness of breath, diarrhea and vomiting and can be fatal in severe cases.
Only two patients in the US have ever tested positive, both in May 2014, and each case was linked to travel to the Middle East. There is no vaccine against the virus.
SARS is also a contagious respiratory illness that spread from animals to humans and between humans during a 2002 to 2004 outbreak that sickened 8,000 people, mostly in China, and led to 774 deaths.
It causes flu-like symptoms such as a high fever, body aches and a dry cough, and, in severe cases, can cause potentially fatal breathing problems.
Only eight patients in the US had evidence of a lab-confirmed infection, with all having traveled to other parts of the world where the disease was present. There is also no vaccine against this virus.
In the US, at least 167million people have been infected with Covid, estimates suggest, and 1.2million deaths have been linked to the pandemic virus.
In the latest study, revealed on the pre-print server bioRxiv, researchers revealed they caught 70 bats from seven species at three sites in Brazil for analysis.
Two sites were in Maranhao state, in the north of the country, and one was in the state of Sao Paulo, in the country’s south.
The bats were caught between May and August 2019, before the Covid pandemic, which first emerged in China in December 2019.
The new virus was detected in one individual from the small insect-eating bat species Pteronotus parnellii, or Parnell’s mustached bat, that is common across South America.
The researchers said it was likely that other bats were also infected, but that the area was under-sampled, suggesting other bats were also infected.
It marked the first time that a virus with betacoronavirus mutations that was not SARS-CoV-2 had been detected in South American bats.
The study was led by Dr Kosuke Takada and Dr Tokiko Watanabe, virologists from the University of Osaka, Japan, alongside researchers from Sao Paulo University, in Brazil, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The researchers also said their work suggested that the virus behind the Covid pandemic could have jumped directly from bats to humans, rather than via an intermediary host.
Experts at the World Health Organization have said that, based on available evidence, the pandemic was likely started after Covid spread from a bat to a human via an intermediate animal, such as a pangolin.
Many experts and agencies have suggested, however, that the pandemic was likely caused by the virus escaping from the coronavirus laboratory in Wuhan, which was at the center of the pandemic.
The new research comes after scientists warned earlier this month that the same chain of events that started the Covid pandemic in China could take place in Europe.
Researchers tracked bat activity at 14 pig farms and found bats were present at every piggery and would pass through the farms an average of 45 times a night.
Tests for coronaviruses showed 15 percent of bats were infected with at least one strain.
This raises the risk of an outbreak by making it more likely that pigs will come into contact with coronavirus-infected bats or their droppings, potentially catching the virus and then passing it on to humans through handling, farming or contaminated food and water.
Once inside humans, the virus could acquire mutations that make it better adapted for human-to-human transmission, causing an outbreak.
