{"id":727542,"date":"2022-07-02T11:42:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-02T11:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=400473"},"modified":"2022-07-02T11:42:51","modified_gmt":"2022-07-02T11:42:51","slug":"infection-of-wildlife-biologist-highlights-risks-of-virus-hunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/07\/02\/infection-of-wildlife-biologist-highlights-risks-of-virus-hunting\/","title":{"rendered":"Infection of Wildlife Biologist Highlights Risks of Virus Hunting"},"content":{"rendered":"
The illness was<\/u> mysterious. A 25-year-old graduate student had been hospitalized with a high fever, muscle and joint pain, a stiff neck, fatigue, sores in her throat, and a metallic taste in her mouth. She soon developed an angry rash. To make the diagnosis, her doctors had an important data point to consider: Days earlier, the woman had returned to the United States from a field expedition in South Sudan and Uganda, where she had been capturing and collecting the blood and tissue of bats and rodents. That information proved critical \u2014 and is newly relevant given concerns that the pandemic may have come from a research accident. Three days after she was admitted to the hospital in 2012, tests determined that the student was infected with a novel virus that infects<\/a> a type of fruit bat that lives in the rural areas of Uganda.<\/p>\n The graduate student recovered and left the hospital two weeks later. But the incident, which was written<\/a> up in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2014, proved scientifically important. Not only did it allow for the identification of the Sosuga virus \u2014 a paramyxovirus named for Southern Sudan and Uganda \u2014 and the knowledge that the bat virus can infect and sicken people, the woman\u2019s infection also pointed to the dangers posed by the kind of research she was doing: trapping, manipulating, and dissecting animals suspected of being infected with novel disease-causing viruses.<\/p>\n Biosafety experts have long worried over the possibility that scientists seeking dangerous viruses in the wild could inadvertently become infected in the course of either capturing or coming into contact with the saliva, urine, or feces of the animals. The case of the Sosuga virus shows that those concerns are well founded.<\/p>\n Virus hunter Michael Callahan, an infectious disease doctor who has worked for federal agencies on global disease outbreak and the tracking of wildlife pathogens, has vividly described the high risks faced by field researchers<\/a>. \u201cSquirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile wildlife,\u201d he wrote in Politico in 2021. \u201cThe fact that researchers are not infected every time they do a field collection is a question that continues to stump us.\u201d<\/p>\n With more than 6 million people now dead from Covid-19, the catastrophic potential of a researcher becoming infected with a wildlife pathogen has become inescapable. While the origins of the current pandemic are still\u00a0unclear<\/a>, it remains\u00a0possible that virus hunting could have been the cause. Rocco Casagrande, a biochemist who\u00a0was hired by\u00a0the National Institutes of Health\u2019s Office of Science Policy to assess the risks of gain-of-function research<\/a>, thinks a\u00a0natural spillover of the virus from animals to people, a lab accident, or what he calls a “prospecting based accident” are equally likely potential causes of the initial outbreak.\u00a0He imagined the prospecting scenario\u00a0as “the\u00a0researchers in Wuhan looking for bat viruses found one and got infected outside of the lab.”<\/p>\n Even as the very real chance remains that the search for new viruses led to this cataclysmic event, scientists hoping to prevent viral outbreaks continue to\u00a0seek out new\u00a0bat coronaviruses and other potential pandemic pathogens around the world.<\/p>\n The search for pathogens that infect animals is driven by the desire to prevent and prepare for their possible transmission to people. But that work, which spans the globe and is funded in large part by the U.S. government<\/a>, can sometimes result in human infection \u2014 exactly the outcome it is meant to prevent.<\/p>\nAsk the Bats<\/h2>\n