StemCell Therapy

The coronavirus that emerged in China and rapidly spread around the world almost certainly jumped to humans from an animal. While thats certainly not unheard of, scientists are on high alert because zoonotic viruses, as theyre called, can potentially be more dangerous.

The heightened risk associated with animal-borne diseases like 2019-nCoV comes from the fact that our immune systems have never had the chance to build up resistance to them, according to New Scientist.

From an evolutionary perspective, a successful virus is one that develops to spread rapidly and rampantly something that depends on the survival of its host.

They dont want you to drop dead within a day because you wont pass it to anyone else, University of Nottingham researcher Chris Coleman told New Scientist.

Recent research in the journal Nature suggests that the coronavirus emerged in bats rather than an earlier snake hypothesis.

In either case, its cause for concern. When zoonotic viruses jump to humans, they can be far more deadly than they were in their animal host because theyveadapted to that animals immune systemrather than ours.

Thus far, the coronavirus outbreak has had a lower fatality rate than other zoonotic diseases, New Scientist reports, but its particularly adept at spreading among humans.

But to fight deadly outbreaks in the future, Coleman stressed the value of preparing broad-spectrum vaccines in advance something still missing for the coronavirus.

See the original post here:
The Coronavirus Started in Animals. That Makes it More Dangerous. - Futurism

This entry was posted on February 8, 2020 at 3:48 am and is filed under Immune System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |