Saturday, May 2, 2020

Coronavirus: Renowned Chinese scientist dubbed 'Bat Woman' warned of potential of COVID-19 pandemic


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Coronavirus: Renowned Chinese scientist dubbed 'Bat Woman' warned of potential of COVID-19 pandemic

By 9News Staff
A Chinese scientist dubbed the 'Bat Woman of Wuhan' warned the public of a virus outbreak from bats up to 15 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr Shi Zenghli was the first to identify the gene sequence for COVID-19, having years of experience doing studies on viruses in bats and other animals.
In 2005, her research discovered that bats are the natural carrier of SARS-like coronaviruses, and in 2015 she predicted the devastation of such animal-borne viruses could have on humans in the modern world.
In the paper entitled 'A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence' it was argued that SARS "heralded a new era in the cross-species transmission of severe respiratory illness with globalisation leading to rapid spread around the world and massive economic impact".
"Although public health measures were able to stop the SARS-CoV outbreak, recent metagenomics studies have identified sequences of closely related SARS-like viruses circulating in Chinese bat populations that may pose a future threat,'' the paper she co-authored with 14 other scientists stated.
In a TED Talk around the same time about viruses, she referenced her research in bat caves around Asia, and said the proximity of some bat colonies to animal farms and human settlements were causes for serious concern.
"Even though we have been looking for so many viruses for so many years, SARS didn't come back,'' she said.
"But in fact, in nature, these viruses similar to SARS.
"Actually it's still there.
"If we humans do not become vigilant, the next time the virus gets infected, either directly or through other animals. This possibility is entirely possible."
Recently Dr Shi has had to defend her and her teams' research in China into bat-borne viruses at the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
She is a key figure at the biosafety level 4 lab located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, and is in the middle of international diplomatic tensions between the USA and China, accused of being at the centre of a 'government cover-up' about her findings into COVID-19.
Despite claims by conspiracy theorists and US President Donald Trump of the coronavirus being leaked accidentally or deliberately from a lab in Wuhan, numerous experts in the field have disputed this.
Scientists found that 66 per cent of the first cluster of 41 cases in Wuhan in December were linked to a wet market in the city.
In addition to this, the genetic sequencing proved that the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus did not match viruses sampled at the WIV.
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President of EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak called conspiracy theories like a lab leak of the virus as "preposterous".
"If you do the math on this, it's very straightforward. We have hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 per cent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time. So that's hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses," the disease ecologist told Vox.
"We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.

"We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China - we'd been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby, and 3 per cent had antibodies to those viruses.
"So between the last two and three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it's 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.

"There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those [virus research] labs.
So let's compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it's just not logical."

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