Word: coronaviruses
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...Even if asymptomatic infectees aren't spreading SARS in large numbers, their presence makes a resurgence of the disease more likely, because they provide a human reservoir in which the coronavirus that causes SARS can thrive and mutate. Equally alarming, the list of animal hosts also increased last week as researchers in China's Guangdong province, believed to be the origin of the epidemic, reported that a wide variety of wild animals?in addition to civet cats and raccoon dogs?now seem to carry a close version of the virus, which could jump to humans...
...SARS coronavirus is the 14th known member of a family of viruses named for their distinctive, crown-like shape. Eleven exist in animals?dogs, cats, rats, mice, pigs, cows, rabbits and turkeys?and two infect the human race, in which they produce that most familiar of all ailments: the common cold. Scientists, who have long suspected that humans were originally infected with common-cold coronaviruses by contact with an unknown animal many centuries ago, had already posited a possible animal connection in the current outbreak. The fact that many of the initial victims in China's southern province of Guangdong...
...cats, hares, beavers and the Chinese muntjac, a small deer. When they examined sputum, feces and blood of the masked palm civet, they hit pay dirt. All six of the civets tested, according to Professor K.Y. Yuen, head of the microbiology department at HKU, carried huge amounts of a coronavirus strikingly similar to the SARS agent. The scientists sequenced its genome and found the two viruses to be nearly identical. The World Health Organization points out that the results don't definitively prove that civets or other animals gave humans SARS. But theoretically, a civet bite or sneeze could infect...
...been looking for a way to help doctors in China since the outbreak began. When he examined the published SARS genome in mid-April, he saw his chance. Ho noticed that a gene in the coronavirus responsible for viral fusion was very similar to the same kind of gene in HIV. If peptide fusion inhibitors worked with HIV, Ho reasoned, they might work with SARS. He ordered peptides of his own design from a company in California that labored overtime to produce the compounds, some in as quick as 10 days. (The process often takes months...
...even with mainland China?s somewhat lax regulations for drug approval, it will likely be a year or more before the peptide fusion inhibitor could be used for patients. And that assumes the coronavirus won?t evade the treatment through mutation. Dr. Edison Liu, executive director of Singapore?s Genome Institute, which recently published a study comparing the coronavirus genome in several different regions, says, ?If the receptor interaction is changed so that the virus uses a different receptor or has a different region to which it binds, it?ll evade the peptide...