Coronavirus

RadishRose said:
As far as the bats. NO one should be killing bats. They seem to be dying off on their own, which is a grave danger because they eat mosquitoes which carry fatal diseases and viruses!
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Bats are also carriers of rabies. Forget who it was, some rock star that bit off the head of a live bat. What a monster, too bad he didn't die of rabies.

EDIT = Found it

Ozzy Osbourne has marked the 37th anniversary of his most infamous onstage incident with a new piece of merchandise. On 20 January, 1982, Osbourne bit the head off a bat during a live show at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa.
 

Catlady said:
Bats are also carriers of rabies. Forget who it was, some rock star that bit off the head of a live bat. What a monster, too bad he didn't die of rabies.

EDIT = Found it

Ozzy Osbourne has marked the 37th anniversary of his most infamous onstage incident with a new piece of merchandise. On 20 January, 1982, Osbourne bit the head off a bat during a live show at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa.
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Any warm-blooded mammal (except the opossum) can be a carrier of rabies. Doesn't mean they all have it.
 
oldman said:
When I was in Taipei years ago, I was taken down a street called Snake Alley where you could buy the blood to drink from different types of snakes. You could also buy the blood from turtles and deer ***** wine. Check it out on Wikipedia.

In Singapore, we ate monkey brains and deep fried chicken feet. Where do they come up with this stuff?

I remember one of the engineers in Hong Kong back in the 70’s telling me “We don’t waste anything. We not like Americans.” My reply was, “Yeah, OK, thank goodness we do throw some stuff away.”
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Yes. In Thailand, there are special stores where they keep Cobras & they sell cups of their blood. These morons believe it will make couples who are having trouble conceiving more fertile because Cobras give birth to many young. Maybe they should drink rabbits' blood instead.
 
Quarantining a city of 11 million and restricting the movement of 40+ million yesterday when the official announced death toll was only 26 seemed mighty extreme. Not to mention basically cancelling Chinese New Year and the billions of yuan that businesses are losing related to that. I don't at all trust the 'official' infection rate or mortality numbers coming out of China.
 
win231 said:
Any warm-blooded mammal (except the opossum) can be a carrier of rabies. Doesn't mean they all have it.
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Well, I wish that bat had rabies and Osbourne had gotten it, he was and still is a freak. This is what I found, bats are one of the primary carriers of rabies.

Any warm-blooded mammal can carry or contract rabies, but the primary carriers in North America are raccoons, skunks, bats, foxes and coyotes.
 
China (Hong Kong) and Singapore have wet markets, which sell live animals and produce. Unlike dry markets that sell merchandise. The wet market that I visited while in Singapore sold some really weird things, which included, live and dead fowl, fish and a few small animals.
 
AnnieA said:
Think it had to have been much higher than 26 for all the measures that are being taken.
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This virus is known to transmit from human to human. One human can sicken hundreds of people in crowd situation. And this just in time for celebrations with millions of people crowded together. It's a recipe for disaster. The last I heard there were already two people in the US with the virus, and who knows how many people they were in contact with.
 
Virus in China Is Part of a Growing Threat
Coronaviruses, named for crown-like spikes on their surfaces, mutate rapidly



Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that infect mostly pigs, cats and other animals. Photo: CDC

By
Betsy McKay

The virus implicated in an outbreak of pneumonia in central China is in a class of pathogens that are a growing player in global infectious-disease epidemics.

A man in Washington State was diagnosed this week with the new Wuhan coronavirus, the first case to be confirmed in the U.S. in an outbreak that has sickened hundreds of people in Asia, with a small number of deaths.

The outbreak is believed to have originated in the city of Wuhan in December, and has spread to other cities in China as well as other countries. A leading Chinese health official said this week that the virus has spread between humans.

Wuhan has all the ingredients for a coronavirus outbreak, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and other experts say: a big, densely populated city with live animal markets where people and possibly infected pigs, bats or other mammals mingle.

Epidemic Potential

Coronaviruses are jumping increasingly from animals to humans, creating new threats

B3-FW184_CORONA_300PX_20200110160918.jpg


NL63 (1100s)



SARS (2003)



229E (1800s)

MERS (2012)



OC43 (1800s)



Wuhan CoV (2020)



HKU1 (unknown)


Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that infect mostly pigs, cats and other animals. They can also jump from animals to humans, and from one human to another. Outbreaks in recent years have killed thousands of pigs in China.

Seven strains are known to infect humans, including the virus in Wuhan, causing illnesses in the respiratory tract. Four of those strains cause common colds. Two others, by contrast, rank among the deadliest of human infections: severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS.

Named for crown-like spikes on their surfaces, coronaviruses mutate rapidly, essentially making mistakes easily as they copy their genome to produce offspring. “They can recombine with incredibly high efficiency,” said Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert and professor of epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. Two or three coronaviruses in the same cell can mix and produce new offspring viruses quickly, he said.


The reservoir, or natural home, of the coronavirus is believed to be in bats. But the virus jumps easily from one host to another, evolving as it moves. Investigators searching for the source of the SARS virus first found it in civet cats, an animal often eaten in the region of southern China where humans first were infected. Later, they traced it to bats found at the same markets where the civet cats were sold.

New, more severe human coronaviruses are emerging at an accelerating pace. Since 2002, three new types of coronavirus have emerged: SARS, MERS, and now this one in Wuhan.


China’s Mysterious New Virus Spreads Beyond the Epicenter
Chinese health authorities have reported hundreds of cases of a pneumonia-like illness that has spread to South Korea, Japan and Thailand. While different from the deadly SARS, the coronavirus is sparking memories of the outbreak in the early 2000s, as doctors try to understand the disease. Photo: Getty Images

SARS changed the game for virologists as the first coronavirus that was deadly to humans. Before that, it was known as a virus causing common colds. MERS is even deadlier. It also infects people on a continuing basis, unlike SARS, which disappeared after causing one epidemic that shook up global public health.

The new Wuhan virus appears milder, though some people have been severely ill and there have been a small number of deaths.

More new human coronaviruses are likely to emerge, said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. organization that identifies and researches emerging viruses around the world, including tracing SARS and MERS to bats. “Our ecology is changing,” he said. “We’re exposed more to animal pathogens.”

Coronaviruses are “well poised to take advantage of a more densely populated planet with integrated farm methods that bring large numbers of animals together to feed populations,” said Dr. Baric.

Populations are aging, too, and coronavirus causes more severe illnesses in people over age 65.

Researchers have traced about 100 or more SARS-related coronaviruses circulating in bats in China, Dr. Daszak said. Some can infect humans, lab experiments show, he said. The Wuhan strain is similar to bat coronaviruses that led to SARS, scientists say.

One question is whether the Wuhan strain will recede, like SARS, or continue to cause outbreaks, like MERS, Dr. Osterholm said.


The Wuhan outbreak demonstrates how urgent the need is for drugs to treat emerging coronaviruses, said Timothy Sheahan, an assistant professor of epidemiology at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. In a paper published Friday in Nature Communications, he and colleagues showed that an antiviral drug by Gilead Sciences Inc., remdesivir, lessened lung disease from MERS in mice. He hopes to study the effects of the drug on the new Wuhan strain. The same drug has been given to people with Ebola, and reduced the severity of their disease, though not as much as two other therapies.

“We have a new coronavirus emerging every 10 years,” Dr. Sheahan said. “As we come into contact with animals that we didn’t come into contact with before, I think we’re going to see this more and more often.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/virus-in-china-is-part-of-a-growing-threat-11578692839
 
drifter said:
Someone said the cause of this latest problem might be snakes.
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Well, then I should have caught the virus many times. I've had pet snakes for the first 25 years of my life & constantly handled them.
I think what happens is, when researchers (& other professionals who have lots of letters after their name) can't figure out where something came from, they just pick something many people don't like & blame it - snakes, rats, mice, etc. They want to sound intelligent, so they won't admit they just don't know or they don't have a solution. A scapegoat like that works.

You may recall the "Hantavirus" several years ago. It was blamed on mouse droppings.
 
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hollydolly said:
they are saying that the virus could be coming from people who eat affected Bats as a delicacy or from snakes... also bats, and bat droppings are used in a lot of Chinese ''medicine''

There's a video which has gone viral in the last 24 hours and in all the media showing a woman eating a bat in an upmarket restaurant in Wuhan the city where the virus is said to have originated...
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That is so unbelievably disgusting. And it looks like this new one likely did originate from bats according to genetic analysis of the virus. Researchers can't say that with 100% certainty, but the genetic profile of this new human strain has a high percentage match to bat strains.

Unfortunately, genetic analysis can’t identify what animal species the coronavirus jumped from into humans. But an analysis by a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, posted to the preprint server bioRxiv, determined that the genome of this coronavirus (the seventh known to infect humans) is 96% identical to that of a bat coronavirus, suggesting that species is the original source. (Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, another team of scientists in China reported that the new coronavirus is 86.9% identical to the bat SARS-like coronavirus.)​

https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/24...navirus-genome-tracing-origins-and-mutations/
 
I spent most of 1967 in Thailand, and "sampled" some of the local cuisine over there. Looking back, at what I probably ate, and the conditions of preparation, it's a wonder that I didn't come down with some strange bug. If I were to recount some of the food items that the locals consumed, which I was Not brave enough to try, It would probably cause some people to vomit, just reading about it.
 
win231 said:
Well, then I should have caught the virus many times. I've had pet snakes for the first 25 years of my life & constantly handled them.
I think what happens is, when researchers (& other professionals who have lots of letters after their name) can't figure out where something came from, they just pick something many people don't like & blame it - snakes, rats, mice, etc. They want to sound intelligent, so they won't admit they just don't know or they don't have a solution. A scapegoat like that works.

You may recall the "Hantavirus" several years ago. It was blamed on mouse droppings.
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My state is one of the ones that have the hantavirus. It IS transmitted through contaminated mouse droppings and urine, particularly from a specific breed of mouse. Every year we have a few cases.
 
Butterfly said:
My state is one of the ones that have the hantavirus. It IS transmitted through contaminated mouse droppings and urine, particularly from a specific breed of mouse. Every year we have a few cases.
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I realize that's what the "experts" say, but I'm wondering how they proved that. I don't understand how droppings would be contaminated so they make people sick? Every animal & every person produces dropping & urine. Wouldn't people who pick up after their pets get sick?
 
win231 said:
I realize that's what the "experts" say, but I'm wondering how they proved that. I don't understand how droppings would be contaminated so they make people sick? Every animal & every person produces dropping & urine. Wouldn't people who pick up after their pets get sick?
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The deer mouse is a vector for the hantavirus and the mouse sheds the virus in its droppings and urine. It's not droppings and urine that cause the virus, but rather that the droppings of the particular mouse that carries the virus contain the virus and spread the disease.

I dunno why it's just that mouse and not all mice, or why the virus doesn't spread to other animals, but it doesn't. Anyway, the deer mouse isn't a common house mouse, and they tend to live in forests and brushlands.
 

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