Mutating Viruses in Humans and Dogs

By Amy Fernandez

I bet you are dying to hear more about coronavirus, right? Not! Okay, we’re all pretty burned out on this particular subject but here’s the thing. Research, which has been happening at lightning speed for the past year, tends to have the side benefit of unplanned discoveries. And that has been the case with coronavirus research. Pre-pandemic, we knew about seven coronaviruses like SARS, MERS and the common cold. Researchers acknowledged that plenty of others exist, but overall, there wasn’t much motivation, funding or technology to get them on the record.

That all changed last year when this global emergency prompted a cascade of research that required new, better screening tools. And those recent technical breakthroughs have opened up a new field of discovery about this family of viruses. So there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the latest one to be identified, which was announced recently in the journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases, is another canine coronavirus. Yes, there are a couple of those we know about already, but this one is unique because it was initially identified in a human subject, actually in a few humans. Doctors in Malaysia who first found this viral renegade were baffled and not quite believing they had identified a dog virus in a human patient. So, they sent samples to veterinarians at Ohio State. And they confirmed that it was indeed a novel coronavirus (yes, another one) that seems to have mutated into a form capable of crossing the species barrier (yes, another one of those, too).

Its similarities to documented canine strains led to its identification. And so far, the best evidence suggests that it developed from a piecemeal combination of two different canine strains mixed with fragments of both pig and feline coronaviruses. The prevailing theory at the moment is that it’s a transitional mutation, which occurs as a virus adapts to a new species. So far, there’s no evidence that it has evolved the ability to spread between humans. Nor is there any information about its actual prevalence in most canine populations. At this point they’re not even sure if the virus was transmitted to the patient by a dog. To illustrate the mercurial nature of cross-species infection, they noted that although dogs and cats are susceptible to SARS, it doesn’t work the other way. They cannot transmit it to humans.

So, that’s the good news. There’s no evidence that you can catch this from your dogs. Actually, researchers speculate that this strain may have existed in canine populations for a long time. But it’s only recently that we’ve had the capability–or the incentive–to investigate this weird family of viruses. Most likely, we will be finding many others, including more of these mutated mix-and-match strains because that’s what viruses do. Dr. Lednicky, a virologist at FSU, explained it this way, “Humans and dogs have been together for a long time. We’ve probably been exchanging these viruses; they just weren’t recognized.” And hey, what’s life without a few dog germs?

Short URL: http://caninechronicle.com/?p=202702

Posted by AnthonyA on May 28 2021. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.