Dubai – Masaader News
Researchers has identified six previously unknown viruses that belong to the same coronavirus family as the pathogen responsible for the COVID-19 disease pandemic, known as SARS-CoV-2, according to Newsweek.
The scientists, led by Marc Valitutto with the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park and Conservation Biology Institute, detected the novel viruses in free-ranging bats living in the southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses containing the pathogens that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS,) Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS,) and recently identified COVID-19. According to the researchers, none of the viruses identified in the study appear to be closely related to the pathogens that cause the three aforementioned diseases.
Scientists are increasingly recognizing that bats are natural reservoirs for viruses that are of public health concern to humans. In fact, SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses such as the pathogen responsible for SARS, are thought to have originated in bats. In the case SARS-CoV-2, the virus is thought to have passed through an intermediary host before first being transmitted to humans in Wuhan, Hubei province, China.
While the the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has been linked to a specific wet market in Wuhan where live animals were sold, some scientists have argued that the evidence indicating the virus originated there is not conclusive.
But despite their potential to spread infectious diseases to humans, bats also play an “indisputably essential” role in ecosystems, according to the authors of the study.