Ecohealth Alliance

This team of scientists is working for an American NGO called the EcoHealth Alliance. Their job is to try to prevent the epidemic by identifying unknown viruses.

The head of the specialized agency is Peter Daszak, who led a team of scientists to light a helmet strapped to his head and trap him in the dark bamboo bushes in front of the bat's den.

A thrilling account of scientists raiding a limestone cave in China's southwestern province of Wuhan has emerged, according to a CNN report.

As soon as the sun set, thousands of bats began to leave the camp in search of food. But outside the cave, they are trapped in a trap set by Daszak's group.

The scientists then rolled up the net, using a mild anesthetic to put the trapped bat to sleep. He then collects blood from the arteries of the bat's wings.

The saliva and feces of bats are also collected at this time, Daszak said.

CNN has introduced him as a 'virus hunter'. In the last 10 years, the scientist has visited bats in 20 countries in search of pathogens that could cause new diseases.

The only purpose is to identify the pathogen before it suddenly spreads like an epidemic and overwhelms the world. Daszak is mainly looking for different species of coronavirus.

He said, “We have taken more than 15,000 samples from bats; And from there, we've identified 500 new coronaviruses. "

A new coronavirus was found in a cave in China in 2013, which may have been a precursor to the virus responsible for Kovid-19.

In search of coronavirus

In the sixties, two types of coronaviruses were found that could infect humans. But before the SARS epidemic in 2003, research on coronavirus did not generate much interest.

In the words of virologist Wang Linfar, the coronavirus did not find much appeal in medical research.

The samples collected by the EcoHealth Alliance were developed by Wang Linfer, a researcher at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

In 2009 a special project funded by USAID was launched by the University of California Davis, the EcoHealth Alliance, the Smithsonian Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the California-based company Metabolia, which created an epidemic tracker.

They named the project 'Predict'. Its job is to identify new types of diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans and the viruses responsible for it, before the patient can start spreading to humans.

The project has received ২০ 200 million in funding over the past ten years since its launch. And researchers have identified five new types of coronaviruses that can cause epidemics. This includes the new coronavirus responsible for Covid-19.

Peter Daszak says that different species of bats act as carriers of 15,000 species of coronavirus, of which only a few hundred theoretical people have come to know so far.

Daszak's company kept an eye on the limestone caves in the mountains of China's Yunnan Province, where there are large bat habitats.

“We started research from China because our goal was to find the source of SARS. Then we realize that there are hundreds of other types of coronaviruses that are dangerous to humans, so we focus on finding them. ”

Of the 31 countries where Predict has worked, a team from the Smithsonian Institution's Global Health Program has collected data from Myanmar and Kenya.

Suzanne Murray, who led the group, said they had so far identified six types of coronavirus in Myanmar.

“There is an abundance of biodiversity in many areas. As the population grows, so do their settlements in the wild. The communication system is getting better, the number of cattle is also a lot. All in all, the risk of spreading the virus from animals to humans is much higher. ”

Peter Daszak said many people in Southeast Asia and China are regularly exposed to wildlife. They hunt, sell in the market, eat. That is why they have paid more attention to finding the virus in those areas.

In 2015, Daszak's team tested blood samples from locals near two bat caves in Jinning County, Yunnan Province, China, and found that three percent of them had antibodies to the virus that are commonly found in bats.

"They may have unknowingly come in contact with the pathogen and recovered. Or they may have had a mild infection. ”

Coronavirus Library

After collecting samples from the body of the bat, it is stored in liquid nitrogen. The samples were then sent to various countries around the world for research in EcoHealth Alliance's collaborative labs.

"We usually choose the best laboratory in a country to work with," Daszak said. If there is no such thing, then arrangements have to be made locally. ”

The genes of those samples are extracted in the lab. They then met with human and animal viruses stored in a genebank run by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Supaporn Wacharapruksadi, who is researching the new disease in a lab affiliated with Chulalankorn University in Bangkok, said that if a virus contains 20 percent of the known virus samples with the DNA format, it is considered a new type of virus.

When a new outbreak of pneumonia broke out in China last December, Shi Zhengli, an expert at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, identified the EcoHealth Alliance with the sample.

Match five hundred new coronavirus samples.

Peter Daszak said 98.2 percent of the new virus samples matched the virus found in the body of a Horseshoe bat found in a cave in Yunnan in 2013. It is then called a novel or new coronavirus.

"One of the animals played a central role in transmitting the virus to humans. And that's why the genome had that 3.8 percent inconsistency. ”

It is important for scientists to know the source of the virus responsible for Covid-19 disease and how it got into the human body.

Daszak thinks that the new epidemic can be prevented in the future if it is understood how much the virus is infecting people by changing itself.

In January last year, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the EcoHealth Alliance announced they had found a bat in Liberia that was carrying the Ebola virus.

Between 2013 and 2016, 11,000 people died of Ebola in West Africa.

In addition to continuing research, the EcoHealth Alliance is now working to raise awareness. The agency is promoting the risk of trafficking in wildlife and other wildlife. Besides, the locals are also saying that it would never be right for anyone to eat the half-eaten fruit of a bat.