"Just the Tip of the Iceberg" Chinese Bat Virologist Warns of Another Global Outbreak
A Chinese scientist dubbed as the "batwoman" recently gave a stern warning about the ongoing pandemic being "just the tip of the iceberg." Granted that all countries will not join hand in hand in a global preventive effort to thwart an identical outbreak.
"If we want to protect humans from viruses or avoid a second outbreak of new infectious diseases, we must go in advance to learn of these unknown viruses carried by wild animals in nature and then give early warnings. And we must be able to store some drugs and reagents for detection, prevention, or treatment for future prevention and control." Shi Zhengli, a foremost scientist, explained in an interview in CGTN via Fox News.
She also added that:
"We know that there are actually many types of bats all over the world, as well as wild animals. The unknown viruses that we have discovered are actually just the tip of the iceberg."
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The virologist has been named by the media as China's "batwoman" owing to the fact that she has tracked down numerous SARS-like diseases in bats. Her lab, which is located in Wuhan, was accused by top U.S. officials as the root cause for the novel coronavirus, as mentioned in Bangkok Post. However, for the World Health Organization (WHO), those were just mere speculations without evidence as a majority of researchers believe that the virus transferred from the Wuhan market, which was selling exotic animals.
As a matter of fact, a team of scientists was quoted in Express, saying that the "coronavirus is either man-made or is just a rare and unexpected phenomenon."
"This is a new virus that has never been in humans before, but it has an extraordinarily high binding to human receptors, which is very surprising. It is almost perfectly human-adapted; it couldn't do any better," Nikolai Petrovsky, Professor of Medicine at Flinders University, was quoted on the Express.
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Incidentally, a report from the New York Post indicated that the virology lab continues to research animal-borne coronavirus. It was mentioned however, in the article that the bats that were being studied were captured from the southern subtropical parts of China and not in the frigid parts of the country.
With that being said, Zhengli has recently published a study that discusses evolution, animal hosts, and SARS-related pathogens, according to the South China Morning Post. The research is yet to be evaluated by other experts on the same field talks about the bat carrying many coronaviruses, which evolved over time, helping in its transmission.
"All tested bat, SARSr-CoV spike proteins, had a higher binding affinity to human ACE2 than to bat ACE2, although they showed a 10-fold lower binding affinity to human ACE2 compared with their SARS-CoV counterpart." the SCMP posted on their website.
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