Photo Credit - Wikipeda
# 7568
The hunt for a primary (and additional suspected intermediate) hosts for the MERS coronavirus in the Middle East is a major focus of the epidemiological investigation - and while bats and camels remain high on the suspect list – other species may carry (and possibly transmit) the virus as well.
We simply don’t know much about the reservoir ecology of MERS-CoV, and probably won’t until a good deal more serological testing can be done on a variety of animal species.
Dr. Christian Drosten (part of the research team behind Lancet: Camels Found With Antibodies To MERS-CoV-Like Virus) – in an article published earlier this year in Nature’s Emerging Microbes & Infection (Virus ecology: a gap between detection and prediction) - describes the rationale behind such research.
For any virus, the identification of a mammalian reservoir is highly relevant because the ‘fitness valley’ that viruses need to cross for the conquest of new hosts is shallow if the hosts are genetically related.
(Note: Dr. Drosten’s article is well worth reading in its entirety.)
If you are looking for `genetically related hosts’ then higher primates certainly ought to be on your list. While you might not automatically think of the Arabian Peninsula as being home to such primates, troops of Hamadryas Baboons are commonly found across semi-desert regions of Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, and southern Saudi Arabia.
Accordingly, Dr. Ian Mackay takes a look at baboons as a species worth checking for the MERS coronavirus in his Virology Down Under blog.
Follow the link to read . . .
Baboons and MERS-CoV....
This post is based on @dspalten and his interest materials and analyses
Twitter yields all sorts of things to think about. Since the Lancet article on MERS-CoV-like antibody reactivity in dromedary camel sera, one tweeter has been a strong proponent of testing baboons, an African and Arabian old world, omnivorous monkey, for MERS-CoV.
