For now, the risk of a jump from bats to humans and spread to people is very low. Nothing suggests that the next pandemic can come from across the Channel. However, the discovery in the British Isles of new coronaviruses of the same group as SARS and one of MERS – that is, those that have triggered threatening epidemics and the covid-19 pandemic in the last twenty years – cannot go unnoticed. In fact, at least one of them could be not too far from acquiring the same dangerous properties.
The link is there, but it is weak
Other coronaviruses have also been isolated in the past from bat feces in Europe, including Italy, but this finding in itself does not imply any threat. To make the leap of species and infect humans, particular characteristics are needed, such as the ability to bind to the same ACE2 receptor used by the virus responsible for the covid-19 pandemic. So the news is this: one of the new coronaviruses isolated from the 48 stool samples examined in the course of the work, just published in Nature Communications, has a protein on its spike capable of doing so.
In the laboratory, however, the researchers have shown that the affinity between this component of the new virus and the receptor present on human cells is much lower than that typical of SARS-CoV-2, so the newly discovered agent could only infect tissues that express ACE2 in abnormal amounts. It is therefore highly unlikely that it has – at least for now – the ability to infect humans.
The evolution continues
However, the large number of viruses of the same family (sarbecoviruses) believed to be circulating in horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus hipposideros) in the UK, in addition to those already detected in the rest of Europe, suggests that the possibility of dangerous mutations is far from it. what a zero.
Until a year and a half ago, more than 4,000 genetic sequences of coronaviruses had been identified worldwide in 14 different bat families, but experts believe that the reserve of infectious agents in these flying mammals with an extraordinary immune system is much wider than one can imagine today. Among these, no one can exclude that there are some capable of causing another pandemic if they come into contact with humans.
New data on the origin of Covid: the raccoon-dog virus from the Wuhan market by Valeria Pini 17 March 2023
Asia does not have the exclusive on pandemics
Anyone who has read Spillover, David Quammen’s best-seller, knows this well. The phenomenon that gives the title to the 2012 book, famous again in the first months of the pandemic, can happen anywhere. It has already happened in Australia and in Africa, in the Americas and in the Middle East. There is no place where a virus that until a certain moment circulated among animals cannot make the “big leap”, the spillover, in fact, and pass to human beings. So far most of the efforts to anticipate the virus responsible for the next pandemic have concentrated in Asia, above all in China and South East Asia, but let us not forget that even the last flu pandemic, improperly called “swine”, did not originate in edge of a jungle in that part of the world, but most likely from an intensive pig farm in Mexico.
In January 2020, focusing attention on travel from China and on Chinese communities, ignoring that the virus was already circulating in northern Italy, caused a serious delay in the response. The many surveillance initiatives that try not to make us find ourselves unprepared for the next occasion should remember that the predisposing factors, in what some already call the “pandemic era”, are everywhere. And everywhere you need to keep your eyes peeled.
Long form All the animals we have infected with Covid (and the fear that it may come back changed) by Valentina Arcovio 08 August 2022