Professor Guizhen Wu of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in a study released by the Lancet medical journal on Wednesday that the data they had so far was consistent with the virus being initially hosted by bats.
The bat has long been seen as a biological super villain.
Scientists call these viruses zoonotic because they are transmitted from animals to humans.
The fact this new coronavirus has been linked to bats “comes as no surprise to virologists working on bat-borne viruses,” said Dr Stathis Giotis, a virologist at the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College in London. “Bats are recognized as important reservoirs for emerging and re-emerging viruses with zoonotic potential.”
Giotis said that it was possible that the Chinese horseshoe bat, a common bat species in China, was responsible.
Why are bats so adept at harboring and spreading viruses?
While bats are known to carry several high-profile viruses, they don’t seem to suffer from them — with the exception of rabies.
“The current hypothesis among scientists is that the bat immune system has been adapted over centuries of evolution due to their flying ability,” said Giotis.
“Key antiviral immunity components are conserved in bats, but some genes that activate inflammation or specialized-antiviral defense mechanisms are either missing or have altered function,” said Giotis, explaining why they don’t have a typical immune response to viruses.
But deforestation and urbanization, especially in densely populated places like China, are putting humans into closer contact with bats and other animals, which allows the spillover of viruses, Giotis said.
Did the Wuhan virus spill over from bats?
Scientists in China have actively been studying bats carefully given that they’ve long been thought to have the potential to be the starting point of the next pandemic.
In a paper published last year, scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology made an eerily prescient observation: “It is generally believed that bat-borne CoVs (coronaviruses) will re-emerge to cause the next disease outbreak,” they said. “In this regard, China is a likely hotspot. The challenge is to predict when and where, so that we can try our best to prevent such outbreaks.”
“These viruses are a really high risk for pandemic emergence. They’re in bats, they’re across Southeast Asia, people are exposed to them regularly, and they’re actually getting infected,” Daszak said.
It’s too early to say for sure whether the Wuhan coronavirus originated in bats and whether an intermediary played a role. The outbreak was initially traced to a seafood market that sold live animals in Wuhan and scientists are working hard to trace the source both in the lab and in the field.
Wu at the Chinese Center for Disease Control said the data was pointing toward the virus going from bats to another, unknown wild animal, and then to humans. She said no bats were sold or found at the seafood market and the outbreak was first reported in late December when most bat species in Wuhan are hibernating.
“There are initial, although contested, reports that the virus has already been detected in both bats and snakes and the strains in both bats and snakes are similar to each other and to the strains from human cases,” Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told the Science Media Centre in London.
“All the work around this new outbreak is new and ongoing which can explain why there are differing thoughts on what the source may be.”
CNN’s Julia Hollingsworth in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
Source : Nbcnewyork