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There are four animals that have become relevant in the context of coronavirus disease (Covid-19). This column is about them.
It was only in 2013, after a decade of searching for the source of the Sars-CoV (or Sars-CoV-1) virus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, that scientists found the virus’s natural host, horseshoe bats, specifically Horseshoe bats in a cave outside a large city in China’s Yunnan province. The virus had somehow made the leap from bats to Guangdong civets, and from them to humans (the Chinese eat civet meat and the first infected people were Guangdong wildlife traders). A fascinating article in Scientific American in March recounted this search as part of his profile of Shi Zhengli, a virologist in Wuhan. Scientists say bats may be the natural host for the virus that also causes coronavirus disease.
Horseshoe bats, then, are the first relevant animals in the Covid-19 context. That should not surprise anyone. Research has established that bats host more zoonoses (pathogens that can pass into humans, causing an infection) than any other species.
Sometimes transmission occurs directly. Sometimes it happens through another animal. In Sars’s case, it was the masked palm civet that was the middle man. In the case of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or Mers, it was a kind of camel. In the case of Covid-19, scientists believe that the intermediary was the pangolin, specifically the Malay pangolin. India also has a kind of pangolin, the Indian pangolin. Pangolins are widely used in Chinese medicine, making it easy to see how Sars-CoV-2 could have jumped from bats to pangolins to humans.
The pangolin, then, is the second animal of relevance in the context of Covid-19, which, as of Thursday, has infected 3.8 million people and killed 265,000 (of the 3.8 million, 1.3 million have recovered).
The global scale of the pandemic, which has no cure at this time, has meant that everyone knows the importance of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. This is the vaccine that is being developed at the University of Oxford. The vaccine hopes to tackle Covid-19 by injecting a weakened adenovirus into which Sars-CoV-2 genetic material has been inserted, something that should trigger an immune response. The adenovirus that Oxford scientists use is the one that causes the cold in chimpanzees, which explains the name of the vaccine (Ch for chimpanzees and Ad for adenoviruses). Humans share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos (another ape and one that belongs to the same genus as chimpanzees).
Chimpanzees are the third animal of relevance in the Covid-19 context, especially since ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 remains our best bet thus far. There are expectations that it will be available this year, and the Indian Serum Institute has already started doing so, betting that an ongoing clinical trial will work.
But chimpanzees are not the only potential saviors of the human race. In the last two days, a lot of attention has been paid to the llamas, the ungulates with pretty eyelashes. It turns out that they have antibodies that can cope with Covid-19 (the findings of a study on this were published earlier this week in the respected journal Cell). It also turns out that antibodies produced by flames can fuse with antibodies produced by other species, including humans. In fact, research has shown that all other members of the llama family belong, camelids, that produce antibodies with the same property: they are stable at higher temperatures and lend themselves to genetic engineering due to their small size.
The llama, then, is the fourth relevant animal in the context of the pandemic. And if flames have the answer to the virus, they will become as famous as the horses that helped humanity fight diphtheria, but that’s another story.
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