From 2017 - Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus -- and suggests new outbreak could occur

[Celerity]

Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

After a detective hunt across China, researchers chasing the origin of the deadly SARS virus have finally found their smoking gun. In a remote cave in Yunnan province, virologists have identified a single population of horseshoe bats that harbours virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans in 2002, killing almost 800 people around the world.

The killer strain could easily have arisen from such a bat population, the researchers report in PLoS Pathogens on 30 November. They warn that the ingredients are in place for a similar disease to emerge again. In late 2002, cases of a mystery pneumonia-like illness began occurring in Guangdong province, southeastern China. The disease, dubbed severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), triggered a global emergency as it spread around the world in 2003, infecting thousands of people.

Scientists identified the culprit as a strain of coronavirus and found genetically similar viruses in masked palm civets (Paguma larvata) sold in Guangdong’s animal markets. Later surveys revealed large numbers of SARS-related coronaviruses circulating in China’s horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus) — suggesting that the deadly strain probably originated in the bats, and later passed through civets before reaching humans. But crucial genes — for a protein that allows the virus to latch onto and infect cells — were different in the human and known bat versions of the virus, leaving room for doubt about this hypothesis.

Bat hunt

To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs.

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[Wounded Bear]

1. As usual, scientists tried to warn us...

and certain PTB ignored them.

[Igel]

4. Pretty consistently.

Ever hear of a book called the "Hot Zone"? 1994. And he wasn't imparting really new information, just information that the public wasn't much aware of.

The PTB include everybody in charge since (before) then, and includes Germany, China, India, France, USSR/Russia, the US, Mexico, Brazil ...

Focusing on just some has the side effect of saying nobody else was responsible. It's handy, letting ourselves off the hook like that.

But it also has as a side effect letting Xi and Putin off the hook.

They all screwed up. Everything else abandons public health for political squabbling. Nero played his fiddle, we'll engage in our favorite past time, verbal sparring.

[McCamy Taylor]

2. What I want to know is how COVID acquired its ability to pass from human to human.

Did someone tweak a bat virus in a lab? They could justify this (maybe in their own minds) by telling themselves "We are just getting ready for the worst case scenario."

[Igel]

5. Coronavirus' mutate.

And while it went from an intestinal bug to a respiratory one, that might just be due to the fact that something ate batshit and either the virus could infect any old mucous membrane or some particular particles had happened to have the right random mutation to do so.

Coronaviruses fiendishly mutate. Mostly harmless point mutations, but there have been hundreds of mutations documented in just the SARS-CoV-2 virus in this outbreak and the earliest date anybody's said for this virus to be in its real patient 0 is 6 years (with some assumptions pushing it back into the '60s and '70s). In that case, "patient 0" isn't human but pangolin. The other assumptions disengage the virus from the pangolin but add decades to its evolution.

The pattern of mutations and strains so far has squashed with extreme prejudice the "strain L" and "strain S" distinction proposed by Chinese researchers to say that the reason the early death toll was so much higher had nothing to do with their government's response.

[zackymilly]

3. Nuke that cave!

[Coventina]

6. That is ignorant!

There is nothing wrong with the bats!

PEOPLE NEED TO STOP EATING THE BATS - PROBLEM SOLVED!

on edit: deleted expletive.

[zackymilly]

7. Nuke the bat eaters! n/t

[Celerity]

8. the bats passed it on to civets, who are eaten at much higher rates in China, but they do not know

exactly how it was transmitted from animal to human. So many conspiracy theories out there (bioweapons, etc etc)

I think it may have recombinated to human transmittable form in the Wuhan lab and was accidently released into the wild (there are official Chinese studies that said this, but they are now mostly all pulled and hard to get) or it came from the eating of the infected civets. I doubt we ever truly know.

[Coventina]

9. Whatever the cause, killing bats is not the answer.

[Celerity]

10. well, that goes without saying