New deadly Ebola-like virus that lives in monkeys in Africa is ‘poised for spillover’ into humans

Scientists fear they have found the next major pandemic threat: a virus that lives in monkeys in Africa.

Simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV) causes devastating Ebola-like symptoms, including internal bleeding and kills virtually any primate it infects.

It hijacks the immune system, disables important defense mechanisms and breaks down the body cell by cell.

No human cases have yet been discovered, but US researchers say it is “spillover ready.”

By now developing tests and monitoring the virus, “the global health community could potentially prevent another pandemic,” they said.

University of Colorado Boulder experts are sounding the alarm over SHFV’s “compatibility…with humans.” In a lab study, they found that a virus can easily attach to a human receptor and make copies of itself

University of Colorado Boulder experts are sounding the alarm over SHFV’s “compatibility…with humans.”

In a lab study, they found that the virus can easily hold onto a human receptor and make copies of itself.

Senior author of the study Dr. Sara Sawyer said: ‘This animal virus has figured out how to access human cells, replicate itself and escape some of the important immune mechanisms we would expect to protect against an animal virus.

‘That’s quite rare. We should pay attention to it.’

In macaques, SHFV causes fever, fluid retention in the body tissues, anorexia and bleeding. The disease is almost always fatal within about two weeks.

It appears to attack immune cells in the same way as HIV, the precursor of which originated in a species of chimpanzee in Africa.

Author Professor Cody Warren said, “The similarities between this virus and the monkey viruses that gave rise to the HIV pandemic are great.”

Reservoirs for the SHFV family of viruses. includes

He added: ‘Just because we haven’t diagnosed a human arterivirus infection yet, doesn’t mean that no human has been exposed. We didn’t search.’

The researchers focused their work on a family of viruses called arteriviruses, which typically circulate among pigs and horses, but are not studied enough in non-human primates.

They focused on the simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV), a type of arterivirus that causes a deadly disease similar to Ebola virus disease.

It was sequenced in 1964 after simultaneous outbreaks in US and Soviet Russian labs, probably due to the introduction of captive-infected African monkeys.

It has caused deadly outbreaks in captive macaque colonies since the early 1960s.

A wide variety of African monkeys carry a high viral load of arteriviruses, often without symptoms. But SHFV was extremely lethal to the captive monkeys.

No human infections have yet been identified, according to the report published Friday in the scientific journal Cell.

The findings are published in the journal Cell.

The pathogen’s ability to multiply rapidly in the body has echoes of the coronavirus.

Before the winter of 2019, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, had never been detected in humans.

It was a new virus that was believed to have jumped from bats to an intermediate animal before spreading to humans.

The never-before-seen virus devastated people’s inexperienced immune systems and spread unabated for months.

The same goes for another highly contagious new virus.

“COVID is just the latest in a long series of animal-to-human spillovers, some of which have erupted into global catastrophes,” said Dr. sawyer.

Covid’s ability to spread so easily among humans without ever being discovered has led many leading scientists to question whether it was the result of an accidental leak from an urban virology institute at the Covid epicenter. pandemic, Wuhan.