Camels Might Have Spread Deadly MERS Virus
- 11 years ago
Camels might be the source of the deadly MERS, or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, coronavirus that started affecting people last year.
Camels might be the source of the deadly Mers, or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, coronavirus that started affecting people last year.
The virus has infected 94 people and almost half of them died as a result.
Exposure to animals that have a virus is one way that it can be passed to humans.
Researchers from the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment and Erasmus University in the Netherlands looked at blood samples from many livestock animals including sheep, cows, goats, and camels from different countries.
Dromedary camels from the Canary Islands and Oman were found to have low levels of the antibodies that are similar to the Mers virus, which indicates that they might have carried the virus at some point in their lives.
Although this data is a lead to find out where the Mers virus came from, Professor Paul Kellam from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and University College London, said: “The definitive proof would be to isolate the virus from an infected animal or to be able to sequence and characterize the genome from an infected animal.”
Camels might be the source of the deadly Mers, or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, coronavirus that started affecting people last year.
The virus has infected 94 people and almost half of them died as a result.
Exposure to animals that have a virus is one way that it can be passed to humans.
Researchers from the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment and Erasmus University in the Netherlands looked at blood samples from many livestock animals including sheep, cows, goats, and camels from different countries.
Dromedary camels from the Canary Islands and Oman were found to have low levels of the antibodies that are similar to the Mers virus, which indicates that they might have carried the virus at some point in their lives.
Although this data is a lead to find out where the Mers virus came from, Professor Paul Kellam from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and University College London, said: “The definitive proof would be to isolate the virus from an infected animal or to be able to sequence and characterize the genome from an infected animal.”