Experts warn the success of the
cold virus in spreading across the world shows the potential for a
pandemic by the deadly MERS virus, which also came from camels
Ian
Johnston Science Correspondent
Friday 19 August 2016
The first human to catch a cold
appears to have got it from a camel, according to new research.
It means the common cold
originates from the same animal as the deadly Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome, known as MERS.
Researchers at the University
Hospital of Bonn in Germany had been investigating MERS when they made the
unexpected discovery.
Professor Christian Drosten, one
of the team, said: “In our MERS investigations, we examined about 1,000 camels
for coronaviruses and were surprised to find pathogens that are related to
‘HCoV-229E’, the human common cold virus, in almost six per cent of the
cases."
The scientists took samples of
the camels’ cold viruses and discovered that they were capable of infecting
humans, according to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
But tests showed there was no
apparent danger of a new cold epidemic because our immune system was already
primed against it by the human version of the disease.
A number of human diseases are
thought to have initially infected other animals before mutating genetically by
chance to give them characteristics that enable them to infect humans.
Influenza, for example, is
thought to have made the jump from birds to humans several times in the
past. The initial outbreaks can be severe because humans may not have any
immunity. The so-called Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 is estimated to have
killed three to five per cent of the world’s population.
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