If you’re isolating at home and need an interesting read, we recommend this story in Scientific American about a virologist in China who studies viruses that originate in bats—and how her research can help us fight COVID-19 and similar viruses that may emerge in the future.
The story follows Dr. Shi Zhengli, a virologist known as China’s “bat woman,” who conducts global searches “for animal viruses that could find their way into humans” by going into remote caves to take samples from bats to see what diseases they carry.
She worked on the SARS outbreak, as well as other outbreaks in which a virus transferred from bats to other animals, like horses or pigs, to humans.
But even she was surprised by COVID-19. In December 2019, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention called to tell her they detected a novel virus in the same family of “bat-borne viruses” as SARS—and since then, she’s felt like she’s been “fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years.”
COVID-19 is a wake-up call: “Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks,” she says. “We must find them before they find us.”
This is what we mean by One Health—understanding the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health and ensuring collaborations between multiple bioscience disciplines.
Thanks to ongoing research into animal viruses by Dr. Shi Zhengli and others, we have a lot of clues about the origin of the new coronavirus and how to fight it—and importantly, can prepare for future outbreaks by researching vaccines and treatments for viruses that haven’t yet jumped from animals to humans, but someday might.
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