The corona virus has been rumored to be mutating, but there haven’t been any specifics… until now.
An infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke University Global Health Institute (USA), Dr Gregory Gray challenged a graduate student in his lab, Leshan Xiu, to make a test — one that would work like a COVID-19 test but could detect all coronaviruses, even the unknown ones.
A challenge Xiu took on which proved more successful than expected. According to a Clinical Infectious Diseases journal, nasal swab samples collected from patients in Malaysia last year by Gray and Xiu had evidence of an entirely new coronavirus associated with pneumonia in hospitalized patients — mostly in kids. A virus that may now be the eighth coronavirus known to cause diseases in people.
According to NPR, “the (Malaysian) patients had what looked like regular pneumonia. But in eight out of 301 samples tested, or 2.7%, Xui and Dr Gray found that the patients’ upper respiratory tracts were infected with a new canine coronavirus — a dog virus.”
In the bid to cancel all doubt and ascertain the likelihood of a “dog virus,” Dr Gray sent the samples to Anastasia Vlasova, a world expert on animal coronaviruses at Ohio State University. In response, she pointed that (corona)viruses from dog to man were near impossible.
Nonetheless, she carried out some more tests and researches. She tried to grow the coronavirus in the lab, using a special solution she knew worked for other dog coronaviruses, and “the virus grew very well,” she says.
In her research, Vlasova observed what she called a “very, very, unique mutation in the gene of the virus.” This unique form the dog virus had taken did not exist in other dog coronaviruses but it existed in the human coronavirus. In her words, “a mutation that’s very similar to one previously found in the SARS coronavirus and in SARS-CoV-2, soon after its introduction into the human population.” This deletion or mutation of the virus helps the dog virus infect or persist inside its human carrier.
So far, there have been no human to human transfers of the dog virus, but questions around how the patients from Malaysia whose samples were tested and resulted in this discovery got theirs remain unanswered.
As a result, the dog virus cannot be called a human pathogen/virus yet and while the virus is associated with pneumonia, the researchers are yet to confirm that the virus itself causes pneumonia.