Department of Microbiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China.
Viruses. 2021 Oct 29;13(11):2188. doi: 10.3390/v13112188.
In the last two decades, several coronavirus (CoV) interspecies jumping events have occurred between bats and other animals/humans, leading to major epidemics/pandemics and high fatalities. The SARS epidemic in 2002/2003 had a ~10% fatality. The discovery of SARS-related CoVs in horseshoe bats and civets and genomic studies have confirmed bat-to-civet-to-human transmission. The MERS epidemic that emerged in 2012 had a ~35% mortality, with dromedaries as the reservoir. Although CoVs with the same genome organization (e.g., BatCoV HKU4 and BatCoV HKU5) were also detected in bats, there is still a phylogenetic gap between these bat CoVs and MERS-CoV. In 2016, 10 years after the discovery of BatCoV HKU2 in Chinese horseshoe bats, fatal swine disease outbreaks caused by this virus were reported in southern China. In late 2019, an outbreak of pneumonia emerged in Wuhan, China, and rapidly spread globally, leading to >4,000,000 fatalities so far. Although the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is highly similar to that of SARS-CoV, patient zero and the original source of the pandemic are still unknown. To protect humans from future public health threats, measures should be taken to monitor and reduce the chance of interspecies jumping events, either occurring naturally or through recombineering experiments.
在过去的二十年中，几种冠状病毒（CoV）在蝙蝠和其他动物/人类之间发生了跨物种跳跃事件，导致了重大的流行病/大流行和高死亡率。2002/2003 年的 SARS 疫情死亡率约为 10%。在马蹄蝠和果子狸中发现与 SARS 相关的 CoV 以及基因组研究证实了蝙蝠-果子狸-人类的传播途径。2012 年出现的 MERS 疫情死亡率约为 35%，骆驼是其储存宿主。尽管蝙蝠中也检测到了具有相同基因组结构的 CoV（例如，蝙蝠 CoV HKU4 和蝙蝠 CoV HKU5），但这些蝙蝠 CoV 与 MERS-CoV 之间仍存在系统发育差距。2016 年，在中国马蹄蝠中发现蝙蝠 CoV HKU2 10 年后，在中国南方报告了由该病毒引起的致命猪病暴发。2019 年底，中国武汉爆发了肺炎疫情，迅速在全球范围内蔓延，迄今为止已导致超过 400 万人死亡。尽管 SARS-CoV-2 的基因组与 SARS-CoV 高度相似，但零号病人和大流行的源头仍不得而知。为了保护人类免受未来的公共卫生威胁，应采取措施监测和减少自然发生或通过重组实验发生的跨物种跳跃事件的机会。
