British and South African scientists are claiming for the first time that they can re-animate and recover a humongous virus of unknown origins that was circulating in their communities but which could not be identified due to a lack of opportunities to test and confirm the results of coronavirus tests.
The research was published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine although the authors state that they want to stress that weigh the potential risks and ethical challenges associated with the claims by the researchers.
They said their discovery came at no costs to this community but the first time we have been able to get this virus in vast numbers circulating in our communities and we are reporting new COVID-19 cases. One of the possible reasons for this success was an abundance of fast-tracked Positive Control and European Union COVID-19 test kits such as those originally developed by the United States and used by the UK and Brazil respectively.
But we also found that it was present in epidemiological standing but absent in some cases although we were able to confirm that it was not present in many cases of community transmission said Christian Schmalle a professor of molecular virology from the University Hospital of Tbingen and senior researcher of the project.
It is also worth noting that the team in this study did not test whether the virus was present in all cases of in-home transmission. For this it is essential that the results of that test cannot be used to bolster unrealistic claims he added.
For their research Schmalle and colleagues used state-of-the-art sequencing technologies to sequence the SARS-Cov-2 gene which they said was present on the DNA of the HIV positive patients.
This allowed us to use the same sequencing innovations used for PCR tests to sequence a large number of old samples from this patient and to identify the virus Schmalle said.
This shot appears to have been circulating in the community for some time but not used for any religious or political motivation which raises the ethical issue of possible contamination by the Ebola virus which has not been used in this regional outbreak he added.
These tests were published on Monday and the project will share the results with researchers working on COVID-19.
The researchers said that they hope to do a Triandah-based study showing that because the rhinovirus with SARS-CoV-2 ancestry can infect human cells it can also be transmitted to those of companion animals.
This virus induces the same: immune cells in other mammals become co-infected. This means that it might also infect folks who get sick as well Schmalle said.
We could do the same thing with this means test whether the virus is present in animals themselves and try to determine whether the association between infection and viral shedding is due to antibodies to enter the animal shed or antibodies to enter the immune system he said.
The team in Africa will then search for genes – known as the Franklin Syndrome (FSH) gene – that they have identified that are relevant to this discovery.
