Corona/CoViD-news

While it may sound a bit like sending coal to Newcastle, every year Saudi Arabia (along with a number of other Middle Eastern countries) import camels from other regions of the world, notably North Africa and Australia.  

Camels are a prized source of meat, and many are sacrificed for religious festivals, requiring a constant re-supply. 

The concern is, camels are a known host for a number of infectious diseases, including MERS-CoV, which has spilled over to more than 2500 people since 2012, killing roughly 35%.  While MERS-CoV reports have declined since 2019, the virus hasn't gone away (see May 2024 WHO DON on MERS-COV Cluster In Saudi Arabia).

This sharp decline in MERS-CoV cases over the past five years has attributed to a number of factors, including the adoption of pandemic precautions, and potential immunity gained by COVID infection or via the COVID vaccine (see CIDRAP COVID vaccine may boost antibody response to MERS, other coronaviruses).

But coronaviruses are highly mutable, and have the potential to recombine into new variants, which raises concerns over the co-circulation of MERS-CoV along with COVID, and other coronaviruses (see Nature: CoV Recombination Potential & The Need For the Development of Pan-CoV Vaccines).

Today we've a study - published in Cureus - on the incidence of non-MERS coronaviruses detected in imported camels from Sudan (n = 225) and Djibouti (n = 112), sampled at their port of entry between 2016-2017. 

The authors report finding a diverse array of coronaviruses with zoonotic potential, which in their words:

This suggests that camel importation could introduce new, divergent CoVs into Saudi Arabia, potentially leading to recombination events and increased viral diversity.

Over the years we've looked at a number of non-MERS and non-SARS coronaviruses with zoonotic potential that are often found in bats, swine and even cattle.  A few examples include:

• In 2014, in SECD: Another Emerging Coronavirus Threat - in the wake of several newly discovered coronaviruses detected in North American swine - we looked at growing concerns that some porcine-adapted coronaviruses might have zoonotic potential, given the similar physiology between our two species.  

• In the summer of 2017 we looked at paper published in the  EID Journal: A New Bat-HKU2–like Coronavirus in Swine, China, 2017, on the recent discovery of a new HKU2-like coronavirus in Chinese pigs showing symptoms of PED (Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea), which they tentatively named porcine enteric alphacoronavirus (PEAV). 

• And summer, in a letter published in the Journal of Medical Virology, Chinese scientists made a case for the Potential Cross-Species Transmission Risks of Emerging Swine Enteric Coronavirus to Human Beings.