Thursday, May 27, 2021

Sars 2 hide and seek game

11-9-20  the climate of competition that reigns in the world of research encourages fast, frantic experimentation that does not really take ethical questions into account, nor weigh a project’s potential risks.   -Virologist Étienne Decroly  https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-being-seriously-questioned

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7-6-20  “The very same techniques, the very same experimental strategies using RaTG13 as the starting point, would yield a virus essentially identical to Sars-Cov-2.”  -Ebright    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-deadliest-maze-how-scientists-tracked-covid19-in-secret/news-story/715b875698e30b1cfa910f2cd54a2376?fbclid=IwAR1mr_oS9DPJVXOh2X9NsxBI7D7rdsV22KMStUPIWSDqLFRtC4JojK1lglc

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7-4-20   Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in southwest China, is known as “the city of eternal spring” because its unique climate encourages flowers to bloom all year.  The sprawling high-rise buildings of the First Affiliated Hospital tower over the ancient city.

On Tuesday April 24, 2012, a 45-year-old man with the surname of Guo was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit suffering from severe pneumonia.

  The next day a 42-year-old man with the surname Lv was taken to the hospital with the same life-threatening symptoms, and by Thursday three more cases — Zhou, 63, Liu, 46, and Li, 32 — had joined him in intensive care.  A sixth man called Wu, 30, was taken into intensive care the following Wednesday.

All the men were linked.  They had been given the task of clearing out piles of bat faeces in an abandoned copper mine in the hills south of the town of Tongguan in the Mojiang region.   Some had worked for two weeks before falling ill, and others just a few days.

  The illness confounded the doctors.  The men had raging fevers of above 39C, coughs and aching limbs.  All but one had severe difficulty in breathing.

After the first two men died, the remaining four underwent a barrage of tests for haemorrhagic fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis and influenza, but they all came back negative.  They were also tested for Sars, the outbreak that had erupted in southern China in 2002, but that also proved negative.

  The doctors sought the opinion of Professor Zhong Nanshan, a British-educated respiratory specialist and a former president of China’s medical association who had spearheaded his country’s efforts to combat Sars.  Aware the men might be suffering from another Sars-related coronavirus, he advised the doctors to test them for antibodies.

  The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a renowned centre of coronavirus expertise, was called in to test the four survivors.  These produced a remarkable finding:  while none had tested positive for Sars, all four had antibodies against another, unknown Sars-like coronavirus.

  Furthermore, two patients who recovered and went home showed greater levels of antibodies than two still in hospital, one of whom later died.  Researchers in China have been unable to find any news reports of this new Sars-like coronavirus and the three deaths.  There appears to have been a media blackout.  It is however possible to piece together what happened in the Kunming hospital from a master’s thesis by a young medic called Li Xu.  His supervisor was Professor Qian Chuanyun, who worked in the emergency department that treated the men.  Other vital details, including the results of the antibody tests, were found in a PhD paper by a student of the director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

Li’s thesis was unable to say what exactly killed the three miners, but indicated that the most likely cause was a Sars-like coronavirus from a bat.  “This makes the research of the bats in the mine where the six miners worked and later suffered from severe pneumonia caused by unknown virus a significant research topic,” Li concluded….

  Yu Chuanhua, an epidemiology professor at Wuhan University, has told Chinese media that one man was admitted to hospital on September 29, 2019 with Covid-19-like symptoms but it is impossible now to show whether he had the virus because he died….

  It set out a full genomic description of the Covid-19 virus and revealed that the WIV had in storage the closest known relative of the virus, which it had taken from a bat.  The sample was named RaTG13.  According to the paper, it is a 96.2% match to the Covid-19 virus and they share a common lineage distinct from other Sars-type coronaviruses….

  In fact researchers in India and Austria have compared the partial genome of the mine sample that was published in the 2016 paper and found it is a 100% match with the same sequence for RaTG13.  The same partial sequence for the mine sample is a 98.7% match with the Covid-19 virus….

  “It was just one of the 16,000 bats we sampled.  It was a faecal sample, we put it in a tube, put it in liquid nitrogen, took it back to the lab. We sequenced a short fragment,” Daszak said

  In 2013 the Wuhan team had run the sample through a polymerase chain reaction process to amplify the amount of genetic material so it could be studied, Daszak said.  But it did no more work on it until the Covid-19 outbreak because it had not been a close match to Sars.  Nikolai Petrovsky, professor of medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, said it was “simply not credible” that the WIV would have failed to carry out any further analysis on RaBtCoV/4991 (also named RATG13), especially as it had been linked to the deaths of three miners.  “If you really thought you had a novel virus that had caused an outbreak that killed humans then there is nothing you wouldn’t do--given that was their whole reason for being [there]--to get to the bottom of that, even if that meant exhausting the sample and then going back to get more,” he said.  Daszak:  after sequencing the full genome for RaTG13 the lab’s sample of the virus disintegrated, he said.  “I think they tried to culture it but they were unable to, so that sample, I think, has gone.” 

  Wang Yanyi, WIV director, said:  the institute managed to sequence the genome of RaTG13 but had not been able to return it to a live virus.  “Thus there is no possibility of us leaking RaTG13,” she said.  Shi Zhengli downplays the significance of the miners’ deaths by claiming they succumbed to a fungus.  Experts consulted by this newspaper thought it was significant the men had tested positive for antibodies against Sars.      

-London Times   http://www.eforum21.com/2020/07/revealed-seven-year-coronavirus-trail.html

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