Today
•
reading time 2 minutes
•
121 views
•
store
A variant of SARS-CoV-2 is circulating among white-tailed deer in North America that now differs significantly from the virus with which people infect each other. According to researchers, there are no fewer than 76 mutations. They write about this in Nature Microbiology.
According to the scientists, the virus can jump from white-tailed deer to humans. They came across a case from the fall of 2021 in which a person became infected with a variant that is very similar to the virus that is circulating among white-tailed deer. “In the week prior to infection, the person had had close contact with deer,” the researchers write. “He had not had contact with people who tested positive for corona.”
The fear that sars-cov-2 will jump again from animals to humans is not new. Ever since the start of the corona pandemic, experts have pointed to the animal reservoirs in which sars-cov-2 can develop further. There is a danger that the virus will make the transition from animal to human again and turn out to have mutated in such a way that the built-up immunity hardly protects us anymore.
So far, 54 non-human mammals have been identified as being able to become infected with the virus. In some cases, this can cause serious problems. Because minks turned out to be susceptible to the virus and subsequently infected employees of mink farms, the Netherlands and Denmark, for example, had millions of minks killed early.
It is also theorized that Omikron initially circulated among rodents before the contagious variety spread back to humans. That is not certain, by the way. It is also possible that Omikron originated in a person who was immunocompromised and therefore had the virus among the members for months.