The little-known pathogens may have once been much more lethal, suggesting SARS-CoV-2 may evolve into a gentler virus
Over a few weeks in November 1889, a respiratory disease attacked half the residents of St. Petersburg, Russia, and it soon began to race through Europe and the rest of the world. Two years later, in a spectacularly, a British medical officer, H. Franklin Parsons, described what was dubbed the “Russian influenza” epidemic, which raged until 1894.
Around the same time, infectious disease specialists Dorothy Hamre and John Procknow at the University of Chicago were conducting their own hunt for new cold viruses in medical students there. In 1966, they reported having grown a virus, designated 229E, from a participant who had a “minor upper respiratory illness.” They gave samples to Tyrrell, whose team intentionally infected people with it and showed, again by handkerchief counts, that 229E caused a mild cold, à la B814.
He and his colleagues pointed out that between 1870 and 1890 an epidemic of pneumonia in cows led to “massive culling” of the animals in industrialized countries. This provided “ample opportunity for the culling personnel to come into contact with bovine respiratory secretions” that could have contained OC43’s precursor, they wrote.
Worobey is now hoping to resolve the debate by obtaining archived tissue from people seen at a London hospital around 1890 and looking for lingering genetic sequences of influenza or coronaviruses. Afrom Spain has identified “suitable samples” from that time period as well, at the Basque Museum of the History of Medicine and Science. It plans to probe them soon.
To Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch who helped Vlasova uncover a canine coronavirus that infected a few Malaysians, humanity is under constant, low-level siege from the viruses. “I think there are certainly other animal coronaviruses circulating that are challenging human immune systems.”to gallop around the world, researchers wondered whether our immune memories of its four milder relatives could blunt the impact of the ferocious new virus.
Infectious disease specialist Manish Sagar of Boston University and co-workers have flipped this issue on its head, asking whether immunity to SARS-CoV-2 protects against the common cold. They looked for the cold-causing coronaviruses in nasal swabs of nearly 5000 people who came to the Boston Medical Center between November 2020 and October 2021.