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By David Quammen
The town of Yokadouma is located in eastern Cameroon, near the border with the Central African Republic, at a crossroads of narrow roads that, when I visited in May 2010, towards the end of the long dry season, were unpaved and dry. its laterite clay pulverized through rainy trucks rumbling in the northern Republic of Congo. The call of the city translates as elephant standing, and at the central roundabout there was an elephant statue, with the tusks and the trunk component broken, the booster bar stick sticking out. I checked into the Elephant Hotel, whose dining room had a gorilla skull hanging on a wall, a python skin stretched next to it. I was the post because it was here the next morning that I met my first pangolin, which was also the last.
A young man from the kitchen staff had just brought this pitiful creature from the city market. He carried him by the tail as he hung, dazed and helpless. It was reddish brown, like the trees in the appearance of the road, and by the same explanation, it was covered in dust. The scales covering his head, body and tail looked like rusty steel feathers. Pangolins are amazing animals, known as scaly anteaters because of their skin and armored diet, elongated heads and toothless mouth, are not very similar to genuine anteaters. In fact, they constitute an organization in their own right, one of the orders of the strangest mammals, the Pholidota, comprising only 8 living species (the order of bats includes one thousand and four hundred species). They resemble carnivores by offspring and armadillos by convergent evolution. They feed on both termites and ants, but they can hardly damage any other form of living creature unless it is for their own defense.
The cook threw him into a typhoon sewer to revive him, then let him take a few steps. Its pointed snout, necessarily an observation device for its long tongue in the form of noodles. His eyes were small dark pearls, bright but incomprehensible. Its belly, unprotected through scales, pale cream. It is a white-bellied pangolin, one of 4 African species, 3 of which are local to southern Cameroon. He tried to hide, sticking his head in a small hole in the ground near the wall. But even with its great claws before, the strength and intuition of a terrier, he had no chance of getting to safety. What are you going to do with that? Did I ask the young man? It would be eaten, he said. Pangolin is commonly fed in Cameroon, as in many parts of Central Africa and also in Asia, where the other 4 species are local.
They are elusive creatures, rarely noticed, even through those who spend a lot of time walking through African forests. In 1999 and 2000, J. Michael Fay, an American environmentalist and environmental defender, made an epic journey on foot, with the help of Congolese and Gabonese box teams: 4 hundred and fifty-six days through the last wonderful unspoiled forests of Central Africa, A zigzag hike from the northeast corner of the Republic of Congo to the Atlantic Ocean crossing Ford Rivers , cleaning swamps, digging machete tunnels through footprintless scrub and walking smoothly along elephant trails under the closed forest canopy. Stopping each and every one of the approximately twenty steps, he recorded methodical notes and calibrations in his Rite notebooks in the rain over the entire bureaucracy of biological observation. During his expedition, Fay saw a pangolin. I was with him that day, but I missed him.
However, pangolins are incredibly likely to be captured through humans. When attacked or challenged, their default defense mode is to roll on a ball, like a tablet insect, scales on the outside and sensitive parts on the inside. The so-called pangolin comes from ping-goling, which in Malay means “roll” or “what rolls”. This defense works well against predators such as lions and leopards, but not against those with brains and a pair of hands, capable of opening a pangolin or bringing it back to a village.
Pangolins are also vulnerable to coronaviruses, and this trait has given them an unforeseen role in the mystery of how SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, discovered its path to humans. Sampling of dead pangolin t factors showed that some bring viruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2. Has any population of these animals served as intermediary hosts, in which a bat virus lived briefly, or perhaps for a few decades, obtaining adaptations that can make it devastating for humans? The evidence is complicated. And the factor is even more vital given that the 8 species of pangolins are recently being driven into extinction. Their imaginable involvement in the history of COVID-19 provides them with a strange ambivalence, in danger and (perhaps) dangerous. Even if so many humans suffer and die, it is worth asking the question of the pangolin: has our famine for these humble creatures led us to a global catastrophe?
Pangolins are solitary animals, each feeding alone, and adults gather shortly to reproduce. The female carries her exclusive offspring on her back for a few months and sleeps with her wrapped tenderly in her armor. Although pangolins are hard to find, they will once have seemed infinitely abundant. Between 1975 and 2000, according to German biologist Sarah Heinrich and her colleagues, they founded in the database of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (a multinational pact known as CITES), about seventy-six thousand pangolins have become legally advertised goods on the foreign market. This product flow included approximately six hundred and 13,000 pangolin skins, exported from countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
Pangolin scales are a different product, highly valued in some cultures for their intended efficacy in classical medicines. Between 1994 and 2000, approximately nineteen tons of pangolin scales (representing about forty-seven thousand pangolins) were exported from Malaysia for use in classical Chinese medicine (T.C.M.) in China and Hong Kong. Chinese tradition, as written in ancient texts, argues that pangolin scales, powdered or burned in ashes, can be useful in combating ant bites, midnight hysteria, evil spirits, malaria, hemorrhoids and oxyides, and for stimulating breastfeeding in women. Science doesn’t make those claims: the scales are made of keratin, the same clothes as the hair and nails.
“There are many other people pointing the finger at other cultures,” Sarah Heinrich said recently from her home near Potsdam. Your finger can point in multiple directions. Most of the pangolin furs exported between 1975 and 2000 went to North America, where they were remodeled into elegant handbags, belts, purses and cowboy boots. Pangolin leather is especially appreciated because the animal’s skin has a striking, almost reptile diamond grid pattern. The Lucchese boot company, Lyndon Johnson’s shoemaker, among others, produced pangolin leather boots before 2000, when CITES set the export quota for wild Asian pangolins to zero, which necessarily made the foreign industry illegal.
By that time, pangolin populations in China and parts of Southeast Asia had sold out particularly, not only to make American cowboy boots, but also for regional consumption. At one point, some one hundred and fifty thousand pangolins in China went with a knife every month, their meat was eaten and their scales used in T.C.M. “Such was the extent of this exploitation,” wrote Daniel Challender, a pangolin expert at the University of Oxford, and three co-authors, “which led to the advertising extinction of pangolins in China in the mid-1990s. Importing pangolins was more convenient than tracking the few remaining local pangolins.
Challender was part of his doctoral paintings in the box in Vietnam, conducting market research, gathering valuable knowledge on panpasslin scales, visiting places to eat where meat was served. “If you go to a place to eat in Ho Chi Minh City,” he told me, “you’re going to pay three hundred and fifty dollars a kilo for a panpasslin.” You can grill or boil in a pot with ginger and new onions. Remember sitting in a place to eat in 2012 watching 3 diners enjoy a seven-hundred-dollar panpasslin meal. A waiter took the living animal to the dining room in an old bag. He on a ball in his defensive posture, appearing only scales and claws. “They pulled out a big roller and beat him unconscious,” Challender said. Then they “took a pair of scissors and used the blades of the scissors to slit the throat.” Blood tired and combined with alcohol for diners, and cooked meat.
As Asian populations declined, African pangolins began to move eastward in giant numbers. Since ancient times, many peoples in sub-Saharan Africa have “captured” pangolins, trapping animals with traps, stalking them with dogs or finding them in the forest. Hunters historically fed on their catches or sold them at local wild animal meat markets. Over time, meat has also become popular in cities such as Libreville in Gabon and Yaoundé in Cameroon, leading to higher costs towards the beginning of the 21st century. The stairs were basically moved through ports and airports from Nigeria and Cameroon to Asia, namely China and Vietnam.
“I know we serve as a transit point,” Olajumoke Morenikeji told me recently. She is a zoologist and founder of Pangolin Conservation Guild Nigeria. Judging by the thousands of kilograms of balance seized, he said, “All this comes from Nigeria.”
Luc Evouna Embolo, an agent of TRAFFIC, a network of tracking foreign industry, gave a similar account from Yaoundé. Increasingly, intermediaries encourage other locals to pick up pangolins on the ground and sell them. Intermediaries sell to urban entrepreneurs who export animals illegally. A villager can be paid only 3 thousand CFA francs. (about five dollars) for a pangolin that will be worth thirty dollars in Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital, and much more in China. In 2017, police seized more than five tons of balances, and two Chinese traffickers were arrested.
By the end of 2016, CITES had made the decision to declare illegal the entire foreign pangolin industry caught in the wild and its parts, but trafficking continued. Its scope can now only be assessed from the fraction seized by customs officials and other national law enforcement governments or detected through non-governmental researchers. According to one estimate, almost nine hundred thousand pangolins have been smuggled in over the past two decades. Some of them were alive. Some were dead, peeled with frozen scales and grays. The scales were hidden in bags or boxes in shipping containers, labeled as cashews, oyster shells or plastic waste. Those who stick to this industry, such as Challfinisher and Heinrich, say pangolins appear to be the most trafficked wild mammals in the world.
There is a fashion in urban China for ye wei, or “wild flavors”: wild meat, intended to be imbued with healthy and invigorating properties. Some consumers appreciate the concept that pangolin intake is a respected national tradition. But this perception has been questioned recently. Earlier this year, a Chinese journalist named Wufei Yu published an editorial in the Times highlighting ancient texts that discouraged eating the meat of certain wild animals, adding snakes, badgers and pangolins. Yu discovered that in 652, under the Tang dynasty, an alchemist named Sun Simiao had warned of “hidden abdominal pains.” Do not eat pangolin meat, as this can only cause and harm us. A millennium later, in a collection of medical and herbal knowledge that is now basic to T.C.M., Dr. Li Shizhen warned that eating pangolin can lead to diarrhea, fever and seizures. Pangolin scales can be useful for drugs, li Shizhen has allowed, but beware of meat.
Zhou Jinfeng, a famous environmental advocate who runs the Chinese Foundation for Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development in Beijing, added a caustic rejection. “It’s a matter of tradition,” he tells me via Skype. “It’s all about money.”
And now, with the trafficking of pangolins to China, a new fear has emerged: the trafficking of certain viruses. There’s an unprecedented sign last year. On 24 March 2019, the Guangdong Wildlife Rescue Center in Guangzhou took custody of 21 live Sunda pangolins that had been seized by customs police. Most animals were poorly healthy, with rashes and shortness of breath; 16 died. Necropsies showed a tendency to swollen lungs containing bright fluid and, in some cases, swollen liver and spleen. A trio of scientists discovered at a government laboratory in Guangzhou and Guangzhou Zoo, run through Jin-Ping Chen, collected tissue samples from 11 of the animals and searched for genomic evidence of viruses. They discovered symptoms of the sendai virus, innocent for humans but known to cause disease in rodents. They also discovered fragments of coronavirus, a circle of relatives topped the watch list of viruses potentially harmful to humans. However, this is not good news when the Chen Group published its report on 24 October. Scientists noted that Sendai or a coronavirus may also have killed these pangolins, that further examination can also help in the preservation of pangolins, and that these viruses could possibly cross paths with other mammals.
Three months later, the word “coronavirus” had a different tone. A first small organization of “abnormal pneumonia” cases had given the impression in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province; soon the number had soared at thousands, and the city was closed; Chinese resources had revealed that a “new coronavirus” was the cause of this disease; the first genome had been created and launched through a Chinese team led by Yong-Zhen Zhang of Fudan University and a Western partner, Edward C. Holmes, who organized the publication of the series on an online page called Virological, led by a colleague at the University of Edinburgh; examples had begun to appear elsewhere, adding South Korea, Singapore and the United States; The World Health Organization has declared a global fitness emergency; and everyone was watching now. Scientists who perceive zoonotic diseases, diseases caused by pathogens that go from non-human animals to humans, had begun to wonder, what animal was the source? Everything comes from somewhere, and the new viruses reach wildlife humans, through an intermediate animal that is likely or not wild.
Bats were the main suspects, as the SARS virus that appeared in 2002, very fatal and communicable but temporarily contained in mid-2003, was a coronavirus lodged in bats. The MERS virus, which gave the impression in the Arabian Peninsula in 2012, even more fatal but less communicable than SARS-CoV (as this first virus was known), was also a bat-traceable coronavirus, in this case the bat virus had been established. . camels for a few decades before spreading to humans. Another perception of the host of the new virus was that of snakes, a suggestion made in late January 2020, founded on dim and temporarily rejected evidence.
The bat concentrate on February 3, when an organization led by Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology showed genomic knowledge appearing a close similarity between the new virus and a series of coronaviruses they had discovered, departing a dozen years earlier, between horseshoes. bats in a mine shaft in Yunnan province, a hundred miles southwest of Wuhan. The genome of this bat virus, now called RaTG13, is 96.2% equal to that of the new human coronavirus. This falsified evidence that the new virus originally came from bats, however, a 4% difference between genomes is far from the best option. 4%, in fact, involves decades of evolutionary divergence. Where did the new virus spend that time, in which population of bats or other animals, and how did it spread from one of them to its first human host? With these remarkable themes, some other candidate for the intermediary emerged. On February 7, the president of the Agricultural University of South China in Guangzhou said at a press convention that a team from her institution, in unpublished work, had discovered what could be an intermediate host of the virus, closing the gap between bats and humans: pangolins. According to a report by Xinhua, China’s official news agency, the pangolin virus investigated a ninety-nine% coincidence with the coronavirus that gave the impression on humans.
The announcement was an overestimation of what the investigators had found, but it caused a wave of headlines. Even the Geneva-based CITES secretariat echoed this claim, tweeting the next day that “#Pangolins possibly would have spread the #coronavirus to humans,” and sweetening this bitter tweet with video footage of cute pangolins, one of them a woman with a miner’s back – climbing the branches of the trees and sniffing through the ants. The implication was: these adorable animals bring fatal viruses, so it’s more productive to leave them alone. When the South China Ag exam. the big result was not as big as expected, it was still dramatic. The coronavirus genome that the researchers had assembled, from pangolin lung tissue samples, contained genetic regions that were ninety-nine% similar to equivalent portions of the SARS-CoV-2 genome; however, the overall adjustment was not so close. Perhaps two coronaviruses merged into a single animal, the researchers wrote, and exchanged segments of their genomes, an “occasion for recombination.” Such a chance it would even have been fatal, by correcting a genomic segment of a pangolin coronavirus with a bat coronavirus. This segment, known as the receptor binding domain (R.B.D.), has provided the compound virus with a normal ability to capture and infect certain human cells, some of them in the airways.
Le South China Ag. The team received their pangolin samples from the Guangdong Rescue Center, some of which had already been sampled through the Jin-Ping Chen group. The team examination, of which Yongyi Shen was the lead author, gave vivacity to a technical report when he noted that rescued pangolins “gradually showed symptoms of respiratory disease, adding shortness of breath, wasting, lack of appetite, inactivity and crying. . “Pangolins are sensitive, difficult to survive in captivity even under careful care; Tough foreign traffic situations would make them especially vulnerable to infection. But what killed the 16 pangolins? Was it Sendai virus, coronavirus or some other unrelated cause? We’ll probably never know. Later in the article, buried in a segment on methodology, Shen and his co-authors added that the animals “were more commonly inactive and sobbing, and eventually died in custody despite grueling rescue efforts. Sobs can be seen as a metaphor for shortness of breath, but again, a sob is just a sob.
That morning, in southeastern Cameroon, I left the condemned pangolin at the hotel (I knew I might not save it temporarily and to save my own conscience, looking to buy it) and crossed Yokadouma to the local headquarters of the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife. There, in a convention hall, I met the head of the wildlife section, Apollinaire Otto Mbala, and several other officers, in addition to Achille Mengamenya, the curator of Boumba Bek National Park, who wore a military-style uniform with a thick belt. and charreteras. We talk about legal hunting (of animals such as cephalophos, small antelopes of the forest), illegal hunting (of gorillas and chimpanzees) and the prestige of elephants (sometimes, in some areas, they can be fair play). When the meat of wild animals was confiscated, Mbala told me, it was sold at auction and the proceeds went to the coffers of the ministry. We also discussed AIDS, a serious challenge in the region and why I came here to southeastern Cameroon: to investigate the link between wildlife as food and the onset of the disease.
Humans are vulnerable to the viruses of our closest evolutionary relatives, and were interested in the passage from a safe chimpanzee virus to their first human host. Back at the Elephant Hotel, I had a diary, widely recorded in my rereading, through an organization run by Beatrice H. Hahn, then from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which speaks delicately of the geographical origin of the AIDS pandemic. Hahn and his colleagues developed a strategy to extract viral genomic evidence from fecal chimpanzee samples and, by comparing that knowledge with H.I.V. genomes, had located the population of chimpanzees from which an ape virus (now called SIVcpz) spread from a single chimpanzee to a single human, with catastrophic effects for tens of millions of people. Clearly, the overflow has occurred in the excessive southeast of Cameroon. Many chimpanzees in Africa are inflamed by variants of the SIVcpz virus. But those in southeastern Cameroon bring what appears to have become the precise pandemic strain of the AIDS virus. How did the overflow happen? Perhaps an act of carnage, after the human has trapped or harpooned the chimpanzee; at that time, a cut in the man’s hand or arm may have allowed blood to pass through the virus. This situation was speculative and became known as the cut hunter’s hypothesis.
Mbala turned on her computer to show me an image of a dead gorilla, killed six months earlier, not the national park. The poacher had escaped. What happened to the gorilla’s body? I asked. Mbala hesitated awkwardly, then said he had been sold at auction: “The locals will eat it. It’s meat, after all. It’s very valuable.”
Chimpanzees are evaluated in the same way. From an officer of a conservation organization in Yokadouma, I heard about a rite of circumcision called beka, performed through the Bakwele of the region, to introduce a child to adulthood. He said it was an all-night vigil, non-stop drums, some drugs to keep the child awake, a bath at dawn, then a day’s walk and, despite everything, the crescendo, when a masked officiant cuts off the child’s foreskin. Traditionally, beka also required the village elders to eat the amputee arms of a chimpanzee. Recently, the Bakwele had passed into the gorilla’s arms, the officer told me, due to availability. “Chimpanzees are getting rarer.”
Two days later, I accompanied Mengamenya, the curator, on a sweep against poaching through Boumba Bek National Park. We cross the Boumba River in a canoe, walk through the forest in the bush, count the gorilla nests, walk through the canals to the waist, follow muddy paths covered with elephant tracks and look for symptoms of other people who shouldn’t be. There. We discovered a desert poaching camp, with 3 thatched shelters, a fish dryer (under which a fireplace still burns) and a small bag of reya chips, a classic poison made from the seeds of a vine. At the end of an arrow, paintings opposed to monkeys and other small game animals would appear, Mengamenya explained, and ordered the camp to burn.
We slept across the river and continued the next day. While walking, Mengamenya answered my questions about classical hunting in this component of Cameroon. The reya poison, for example: a hunter powdered it, implemented it with crossbow arrows, shot a monkey and then followed the animal for an hour until it fell helplessly from a tree. Hunting gorillas required dogs, many men and a chaotic procedure to surround a wonderful ape and then harpoon it. (Hunting with rifles or shotguns was easier, of course, but many locals may not, and we hadn’t noticed any used ammunition.) Chimpanzees were regularly trapped with traps, and the damaging moment was when a hunter was nearby. to that one. attached, frantic animal, enraged to take him down with a spear. “There were a lot of hunting accidents,” Mengamenya said. Many hunters were injured. Chimpanzees are hard and bite. It reminded me of the hypothetical cropped hunter. A bloody touch moment can produce many negative results, adding infection with a new virus.
This led me to the consultation that led me to southeastern Cameroon: yes, hunting and eating chimpanzees and gorillas continues. And as long as it does, humanity will be threatened by a spill like H.I.V. But, of course, upcoming occasions have also shown that monkeys aren’t the only animals that harbor viruses that humans can be incredibly vulnerable to.
The stories, in our age hooked, spread even faster than viruses. A history of COVID-19 that spread early and widely since the epidemic had begun among others related to the site of Huanan’s wholesale seafood market in Wuhan. It is a humid place in the market, where vendors presented wild animals to eat (wolf droppings, porcupine and snakes), as well as shellfish, domestic meat and other perishable products. (Pangolins would have been exchanged less openly.) The market site closed on January 1, in reaction to the outbreak of “abnormal pneumonia,” and scientists took samples of what they might have suspected, but no one had publicly said a new coronavirus. The market site was then temporarily cleaned through a team of masked personnel dressed in a white spray disinfectant. The uncovered coronavirus (genomic fragments, plus a viable virus touch that can be grown in a laboratory), but came from sewage or door handles or other surfaces, not wild animals. Although coronavirus screening has been performed on live caged animals in Huanan, these effects have never been announced.
A follow-up to the first 41 hospitalized patients indicated that most, but not all, had been exposed to the market. Some, adding the first patient, whose symptoms began on December 1, 2019, had no known contact with Huanan. This suggests that the coronavirus was already circulating among the city’s population as early as November and that an inflamed user, not an inflamed wild animal, would possibly have transported it to the market.
The first human victim probably becomes inflamed through a wild animal. But it is not known whether this animal is a bat or a pangolin or something, or if it is in a cage in the direction of Wuhan, or maybe lives in the wild, defecating in someone’s garden.
As the pandemic took hold, the Chinese government took several measures opposed to the type of industry that made rainy markets notorious. On 24 February, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s highest legislative body, approved a ban on the sale or consumption of wild animals. On June 5, China’s pangolins rose to the highest point of wildlife protection. A few days later, he learned that pangolin scales would be removed from the “Chinese Pharmacopoeeian”, the official collection of T.C.M.
Uncertainty persists about the origin of the virus. Between February and May, at least 3 other clinical articles on the subject were published, two from Chinese organizations and one from a Baylor College of Medicine organization in Houston. The 3 based their analyses, as did Yongyi Shen’s organization in South China Ag., on the genomic knowledge of the pangolins of the Guangdong Rescue Center. One organization reported that pangolins appear to bring a coronavirus so similar to SARS-CoV-2 that it may be only the source of the pandemic. Part of its evidence was this very important segment of the pangolin coronavirus genome, the receptor binding domain, which bears an astonishing resemblance to R.B.D. pandemic virus. Another organization said: No, our analyses do not consider the concept that the pandemic virus came here directly from a pangolin. The third organization, which published its report in the form of prepress, prior to peer review, agreed with Yongyi Shen: this SARS virus appears to be the result of an occasion of recombination: a substitution in segments of the genome within the framework of an animal, or perhaps on several of those occasions, accidentally combining genes from the bat virus , pangolin virus and even other viruses to become the incredibly well-adapted virus that causes the COVID-19 nightmare.
It is also imaginable that viruses transported through smuggled pangolins do not reflect the viral load typical of wild pangolins. These may not be pangolin viruses at all, but infections contracted through other wild animals in traffic chain situations: tension caused by food shortages, water and oxygen, human manipulation, temperatures too hot or too cold, closed confinement in cages adjacent to various doomed creatures. This would possibly explain respiratory symptoms: pangolins, unlike bats, would possibly not be accustomed to these viruses. An organization of scientists tested the pangolins near the place of origin of the industry in China, collecting throat and straight samples of 3 hundred and thirty-four pangolins of Sunda in mainland Malaysia and the state of Sabah (Borno Malay) that had been seized, or in rescathed in a different way, between 2009 and 2019. No sample tested positive for coronavirus.
Clinical debate on the origins of the pandemic is still ongoing. Among the hypotheses, although only for which there is empirical evidence, ignoring crazy theories, unfounded slander and paranoid hypotheses disseminated online, concepts vary and some sets of knowledge collide with others. Magazine articles are appearing faster than ever, many of which were published, prior to peer review, on “pre-printed” Internet sites such as bioRxiv, hosted through the highly reputed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. Others are temporarily peer-reviewed due to their urgency and published online under the auspices of leading magazines such as Nature, Cell and The Lancet. However, another paper, published this spring through Nature, analyzed samples of some other batch of rescued pangolins from Guangxi Province, as well as genomic evidence of Guangdong pangolins. These scientists discovered two distinct lines of coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2.
Two coronaviruses, which look like our nemesis bug? This seemed to recommend that pangolins are complete with invisible threats. The first of the journal Nature was Tommy Tsan-Yuk Lam; the leader was a well-known virus hunter in Hong Kong, Yi Guan; and among the others was Edward C. Holmes, who negotiated the release of the first SARS-CoV-2 genome. So I asked Holmes, via Skype, for some lighting.
Edward C. Holmes is a brilliant evolutionary biologist, author of an original 2009 book, “The Evolution and Appearance of RNA Viruses” (these are the most active and harmful types of viruses, and come with coronaviruses). Born in England, Holmes is now a professor at the University of Sydney, with close ties to Chinese colleagues. He has a living brain and a perfectly round bald head. His friends and Twitter fans know him as Eddie. When I first met him ten years ago at Penn State, where he was running at the time, his workplace was decorated with a sign depicting Bart Simpson in a cartoon edition of Edward Hopper’s portrait “Nighthawks”. Why Bart Simpson? I asked. Because he looks like me, says Holmes.
“In February, I’m contacted through Tommy Lam,” he tells me now. Lam, a former postdoctoral fellow at Holmes, worked in Hong Kong with Yi Guan. Lam said he and Guan received viral genome sequences of pangolins seized through the customs government in two other provinces, not only those from rescue centers, but also some seizures in 2017 and 2018 in Guangxi province, which has a border with Vietnam and is along a pangoline traffic route. Two things were remarkable about animals, Lam told Holmes: “They have this respiratory disease. And guess what. They have, like, this coronavirus in them.” Another coronavirus, not familiar, but also similar to SARS-CoV-2. Holmes said, “I thought, well, that’s extraordinary.”
Holmes is committed to helping him in his specialty, analyzing genomic knowledge. What surprised him was not only that two different teams of pangolins carried coronavirus infections or that the two viruses were similar to the human virus, but were different from each other. “That’s what’s so surprising, ” he said. “There are two lines, and guangdong lines are closer to SARS-CoV-2 than Guangxi. But they’re either close. Truth? So it’s not like there’s an epidemic of single pangolins. Two distinct coronaviruses, each similar to SARS-CoV-2, one with a receptor binding domain to which human lung cells are highly sensitive, had traveled to southern China in smuggled pangolins.
“What are the odds?” Holmes said. The odds are low. The discovery suggests, he added, that there are many more harmful viruses hidden in the panpasslins than we have detected so far. But not only in panpasslins, not bats, which bring their own percentage of coronavirus, some of which are only a few decades of evolutionary replacement of the ability to infect and kill humans. And not just bats. What other animals might have played a role during this decades-old age of lack, which he called the evolutionary divide? “What’s in the hole?” Asked. “I don’t know. Dogs? Vivid dogs are canids that climb trees with black masks, locals in East Asia and are also sold as food.” “Confession: I ate it myself in China.” Who the hell knows? Holmes said. ” But as long as we don’t pass by and conmeasure them, we’ll never know.” That’s what’s critical. To resolve the origins. »
More box studies are needed, he said. More sampling of wild animals. A closer look at genomes. Increased attention to the fact that animal infections can cause human infections, because humans are animals. We live in a world of viruses and we have only just begun to perceive this. ♦
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