The discovery of a new virus in China … Lanjia may be just the tip of the iceberg

Scientists warned on Friday, 12, that the virus Langia HanibaAnd the Discover in the East ChinaIt can easily be transmitted from humans to animals. While it is unlikely to cause a new global pandemic, the new strain has already infected 35 local residents and farmers and may have spread through shrews, a small mammal found in the area.

The pathogen has caused no deaths so far, but was detected in patients who developed fevers in hospitals in Shandong and Henan provinces between 2018 and 2021, a finding that confirms scientists’ longstanding warning that animal viruses spread relatively quickly. humans undetected.

“We are greatly underestimating the number of these zoonotic cases in the world, and Langia “It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Lee Boon, an emerging virologist and professor at the University of Hong Kong, told CNN.

Globally, an estimated 70% of all emerging infectious diseases have been transmitted to humans through animals, a phenomenon that has grown in recent years due to the expansion of human populations into wildlife habitats. The devastating effects of Covid-19, which has a possible origin in bats, shows the importance of rapid identification of these viruses in order to control them as quickly as possible.

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The first scientific research on the virus was published in the medical journal New England Journal of Medicine Last week it received global attention due to growing concern about disease outbreaks. The article uses Covid-19 as an example, that even three years after it was discovered, thousands of cases are still reported daily.

Researchers point out that there is no evidence that Langia It spreads between people or causes outbreaks of locally related cases. However, more studies and patients are still needed to completely rule out human-to-human infection.

The first signs of the pathogen appeared in 2018, when a farmer in Shandong Province was taken to hospital with symptoms such as fever, headache, cough and nausea. As she indicated that she had been in frequent contact with animals, the patient was enrolled in an additional examination conducted in three hospitals focusing on identifying zoonoses.

When the samples were analyzed, the scientists found traces of deadly pathogens that had no history of human-to-human transmission. Over the next three years, researchers from three hospitals traced the same virus to 34 other people who showed the same symptoms the farmer had described.

Of those, nine patients also contracted other known types of viruses – such as influenza – making clear diagnosis difficult. However, the researchers suggest that the remaining 26 patients may have symptoms caused by Langia.

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Some patients have even reported more serious conditions such as pneumonia or thrombocytopenia, which occur when the bone marrow produces insufficient amounts of platelets, but these cases are very different from those seen in other patients and no one has died or had to go to intensive care lonliness.

According to the researchers, cases have been found at distances of up to 700 km, and since the virus spreads among animals widely spread throughout southwestern China, it is not surprising to see its transmission to humans. Thus, there was no close contact between the infected humans, suggesting that the contamination may have been intermittent.

Once the line was drawn that the infection was not human-to-human, scientists began looking at domestic animals in the areas, but found few records in goats and dogs. The real breakthrough came, however, when 71 infections were discovered in two species of shrew, leading to the theory that Langia revolves between them.

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Scientists point out that more studies are needed to confirm the information discovered about Langia And that the geographical spread in which it was discovered indicates a high risk of infection and its spread. So there are still important questions that need to be answered about how common the new virus is in nature, how it spreads between people and how dangerous it is to human health.