Coronavirus: What we still don't know about Covid-19:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52006988
domingo, 29 de março de 2020
COVID-19: QUESTIONS STILL TO BE ANSWERED
As reported on BBC News
Coronavirus: What we still don't know about Covid-19:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52006988
Coronavirus: What we still don't know about Covid-19:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52006988
sábado, 28 de março de 2020
segunda-feira, 16 de março de 2020
NEW CORONAVIRUS: NEW ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’??
Brief note.
See more complete report on The Scientist.
“The lab-escape theory had been circulating on social media and various blogs for weeks, but gained considerable visibility in a New York Post article in late February. In it, Steven Mosher, a social scientist and the president of the Population Research Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, summarizes why he believes SARS-CoV-2 may have been accidentally spread by China’s National Biosafety Laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers have studied bat coronaviruses”.
“SARS-CoV, for example, was transmitted from bats to civets to humans, while camels were an intermediate host in MERS, according to Quanta. “The civet version of SARS-CoV was 99.8 percent similar to the one found in humans—much more closely related than the bat and human varieties of SARS-CoV-2—so researchers believe the new coronavirus also infected another type of animal on its way from bats to humans. But they have not found a candidate so far, according to Nature”.
“No signs of engineering in SARS-CoV-2 genome.
RNA viruses, which include coronaviruses, “accumulate mutations at a rate one million times faster than human DNA [does]. . . . It gives them the ability to survive against an immune response,” Paraskevis says. While the new coronavirus does have some genetic differences to other known viruses due to mutations, “there’s no evidence that this is the result of a human experiment,” he says, adding that if the virus were engineered, scientists would expect to see additional genetic material in its genome. For example, an early bioRxiv preprint on SARS-CoV-2 found HIV-like genetic sequences, but online commenters pointed out that “the findings were at most a coincidence” and that research has since been retracted, reports STAT”.
[NB.:”Dimitrios Paraskevis, an epidemiologist at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece”. Este epidemiologista enfatiza sobre os rigorosos procedimentos em laboratórios que manipulam micro-organismos. Acredito eu, que é do maior interesse que tais regras sejam seguidas com muito rigor, evitando possíveis desastres para os próprios manipuladores; o “tiro pela culatra”!]
“This ability to move in between different animal hosts is a characteristic feature of coronaviruses, according to Paul McCray, a pulmonologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine whose lab studies coronaviruses. “It’s exactly what we’ve learned in studies of SARS in 2002 and 2003, and MERS in 2012. . . . So the concept that this is happening again should come as no surprise,” he says. “For people that work with these viruses, this is completely unsurprising. We don’t need to come up with farfetched theories when the genome sequences and the characteristics of these viruses support what we’re seeing.”
[OBS.: “farfetched”=improvável].
See more complete report on The Scientist.
Civet (above)
“The lab-escape theory had been circulating on social media and various blogs for weeks, but gained considerable visibility in a New York Post article in late February. In it, Steven Mosher, a social scientist and the president of the Population Research Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, summarizes why he believes SARS-CoV-2 may have been accidentally spread by China’s National Biosafety Laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers have studied bat coronaviruses”.
“SARS-CoV, for example, was transmitted from bats to civets to humans, while camels were an intermediate host in MERS, according to Quanta. “The civet version of SARS-CoV was 99.8 percent similar to the one found in humans—much more closely related than the bat and human varieties of SARS-CoV-2—so researchers believe the new coronavirus also infected another type of animal on its way from bats to humans. But they have not found a candidate so far, according to Nature”.
“No signs of engineering in SARS-CoV-2 genome.
RNA viruses, which include coronaviruses, “accumulate mutations at a rate one million times faster than human DNA [does]. . . . It gives them the ability to survive against an immune response,” Paraskevis says. While the new coronavirus does have some genetic differences to other known viruses due to mutations, “there’s no evidence that this is the result of a human experiment,” he says, adding that if the virus were engineered, scientists would expect to see additional genetic material in its genome. For example, an early bioRxiv preprint on SARS-CoV-2 found HIV-like genetic sequences, but online commenters pointed out that “the findings were at most a coincidence” and that research has since been retracted, reports STAT”.
[NB.:”Dimitrios Paraskevis, an epidemiologist at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece”. Este epidemiologista enfatiza sobre os rigorosos procedimentos em laboratórios que manipulam micro-organismos. Acredito eu, que é do maior interesse que tais regras sejam seguidas com muito rigor, evitando possíveis desastres para os próprios manipuladores; o “tiro pela culatra”!]
“This ability to move in between different animal hosts is a characteristic feature of coronaviruses, according to Paul McCray, a pulmonologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine whose lab studies coronaviruses. “It’s exactly what we’ve learned in studies of SARS in 2002 and 2003, and MERS in 2012. . . . So the concept that this is happening again should come as no surprise,” he says. “For people that work with these viruses, this is completely unsurprising. We don’t need to come up with farfetched theories when the genome sequences and the characteristics of these viruses support what we’re seeing.”
[OBS.: “farfetched”=improvável].
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