Latest news with #SARS-CoV-1
9 News
18-07-2025
- Health
- 9 News
New COVID-19 vaccine protects against several variants, researchers say
Your web browser is no longer supported. To improve your experience update it here Australian scientists say they have created a COVID-19 vaccine that can protect against several variants of the virus. Researchers from the Centenary Institute and the University of Sydney created the CoVEXS5 vaccine, which protects against five variants of the virus, including the "highly immune-evasive" Omicron XBB.1.5 variant and SARS-CoV-1, a relative of SARS-CoV-2. Studies showed reduced virus levels in the lungs of vaccinated mice by 99.9 per cent, compared to unvaccinated controls. Scientists have created a COVID-19 vaccine that can protect against several variants of the virus, health researchers said. (AP) It also triggered high levels of virus-blocking antibodies and activated special immune T-cells in the lungs, which are critical for the body to fight the virus. "By combining parts of multiple coronaviruses, we've created a vaccine that can better prepare the body to fight off both current and future threats," Dr Claudio Counoupas, a researcher at the Centenary Institute's Centre for Infection and Immunity, said. The CoVEXS5 vaccine features a unique version of the spike protein, fusing protein elements from several different COVID-19 variants into one single structure. Researchers say this fusion helps the immune system recognise and respond to a broader range of virus types. The CoVEXS5 vaccine features a unique version of the spike protein, fusing protein elements from several different COVID-19 variants into one single structure. (Getty) "The immune response we saw in the laboratory was both strong and broad," co-lead study author Elizabeth Chan said. "It's exciting to think that this approach could help future-proof vaccines against ongoing changes in the virus." The research team is now focusing on advancing the vaccine through further testing and development. national health science vaccine COVID 19 Coronavirus CONTACT US Auto news: BYD speaks out about their ongoing battle with Tesla.
Boston Globe
10-07-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
What long COVID can teach us about future pandemics
Researchers are improving our understanding of the biological causes of long covid and working toward treatments. These advances may help not only people facing chronic illnesses today but also postinfection syndromes of the future. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up But experts are worried that despite the hard-won lessons of covid, we are not fully prepared for the next pandemic and its aftermath due to decreases in research funding and support, and polarization of public health measures. Advertisement Climate change and increasing human encroachment into wildlife habitats mean a higher risk of diseases spreading. " I would argue that probably we're less prepared for this now than we were even prepared for the covid-19 pandemic," Al-Aly said. Long covid is new and not new Long covid originally surprised researchers and clinicians, but in retrospect, there were clues that infections could lead to chronic health conditions in some patients, researchers said. Other illnesses and pandemics have caused post-acute infection syndromes that bear striking similarities to those of long covid. Advertisement Therefore, long covid is new and very much not new. Related : We now know that 'we have post-infectious disease syndromes that occur, and that it's not unique to covid, but covid really brought it to the forefront,' said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. During and after the 1918 flu pandemic, people complained of feeling lethargic, memory problems and hazy thinking - which sounds a lot like the 'brain fog' and other neurocognitive effects of long covid. Farmers couldn't tend to their crops or shear their sheep, leading to economic distress. Years after the flu subsided, there was a rise in a Parkinson's-like symptoms tied to the illness. There was also a coinciding epidemic of encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, that some believe to be related to the flu, though this link is disputed. Similar long-lasting symptoms followed outbreaks of the respiratory viruses SARS-CoV-1 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in the decades before covid. Some people also face persistent symptoms following Lyme disease, Ebola and dengue. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a still-mysterious chronic condition marked by persistent fatigue and malaise after exertion, is also suspected of having similar underlying causes as long covid; a 2024 meta-analysis found approximately half of long covid patients have ME/CFS. The difference with covid, of course, is 'just the sheer volume of people who had covid and got long covid,' which made it much easier to study and research compared with the other post-acute syndromes, said Wes Ely, a professor of medicine and co-director of the Center for Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Advertisement The pattern is now more apparent: While many people escape unscathed, 'it's clear that there's a wave of chronic disease and disability after pandemics,' Al-Aly said. A nurse recorded a patient's vitals. Long covid originally surprised researchers and clinicians, but in retrospect, there were clues that infections could lead to chronic health conditions. Kate Dearman/for The Washington Post This should factor into preparing for future pandemics and their aftereffects. 'We need to think about both the short and long term from the get-go when designing antivirals, designing vaccines' and identifying patients early to get them help earlier, Al-Aly said. Preparing for the aftermath of future pandemics In many ways, the United States may be less prepared to deal with the long covids of tomorrow than you would think. Understanding the biological causes of long covid will help. 'Investing in an understanding or unlocking the secrets of long covid' is going to pay dividends not only for long covid, but could be repurposed more broadly for post-viral illnesses of the present and future, Al-Aly said. But now, many of those resources and investments are at risk. Related : The Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, established in 2023 at the Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate the sprawling research efforts about the condition, has been shuttered. The HHS Secretary's Advisory Committee on Long Covid - a group of long covid physicians, researchers, patients and their advocates meant to advise on gaps in knowledge and research priorities - was terminated before its first meeting. Though HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated his commitment to finding long covid treatments, citing long covid's impact on his son, there had not been any new structures put in place for long covid research as of June. Meanwhile, clinical trials searching for long covid treatments are continuing, but researchers fear that future funding may be at risk, following cuts to dozens of long covid research grants (some of which were later restored). Advertisement The Trump administration's budget proposal 'I think we have a lot of work to do. And, you know, it's terribly unfortunate so much of this work has been now stopped by this administration,' Osterholm said. However, the multibillion-dollar RECOVER Covid Initiative launched by the NIH allowed researchers to set up clinics and study long covid at a 'much bigger scale than they ever have been before,' said Leora Horwitz, a professor of population health and medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. 'I think they've put us in a good position now to recognize similar sorts of conditions of future as-yet-unknown pandemics.' The infrastructure set up by RECOVER has allowed for the long-term tracking of in-depth health data and could be a model for what to test in future pandemics, said Horwitz, who co-leads the branch of RECOVER studying adult patients, which includes almost 15,000 participants at 83 sites across 33 states. More important, there is now broader recognition that a subset of people can develop prolonged symptoms from infections, Horwitz said. Moen viewed imaging of mice brain sections that have been infected, and then treated, with SARS-CoV-2, at the Iwasaki Lab. Jackie Molloy/For the Washington Post Experts said that many of these developments and understanding were driven by fierce advocacy from the community of long covid patients, who have prompted politicians to act. However, the U.S. health care system remains strained even without contending with another pandemic, said Osterholm, who pointed to a projected shortage of physicians and other health care professionals. Advertisement Fixing the health care system is important, he said. 'If we don't invest right now, the bottom line is we're going to just do a repeat all over again in the next pandemic,' Osterholm said. At the same time, many of the public health tools for mitigating infection spread and severity - and therefore risk of long-term symptoms - have become increasingly politicized. Masking, vaccination, antivirals and improved indoor air quality have all helped combat covid and are valuable tools to implement should another pandemic arise, Al-Aly said. But people are increasingly tuning out these public health conversations and resisting being reminded of the pandemic, 'like almost collective amnesia,' he said. 'We paid a heavy price for this knowledge, and literally more than 1.1 million people died' in the United States, Al-Aly said. Now it's a 'question of whether there will be the political will and also the public sentiment to actually utilize this information for public good,' he said.
NDTV
08-05-2025
- Health
- NDTV
Covid-19 Likely Originated From Wildlife Trade, Not Lab Leak, Researchers Claim
A new genetic study bolsters the theory that COVID-19 originated from the wildlife trade, challenging claims of a lab leak. Researchers traced the virus's origins to animals sold in Wuhan markets, adding fuel to the ongoing debate amid US-China tensions. The findings, published in Cell on May 7, 2025, point to a natural spillover, highlighting the persistent risks of zoonotic diseases stemming from the wildlife trade. Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and their colleagues concluded that the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, emerged just years before the pandemic began. The virus left its origin in Western China or Northern Laos just years before the emergence, travelling nearly 2,700 kilometres to Central China. This timeframe is too short for natural dispersal by its primary host, the horseshoe bat, suggesting it "hitched a ride" via the wildlife trade, similar to the SARS outbreak in 2002. "When two different viruses infect the same bat, sometimes what comes out of that bat is an amalgam of different pieces of both viruses," said co-senior author Joel Wertheim, PhD, a professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine's Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health. "Recombination complicates our understanding of the evolution of these viruses because it results in different parts of the genome having different evolutionary histories." To overcome this, the researchers focused on non-recombining regions of the viral genomes, allowing them to more accurately reconstruct the evolutionary history. The study indicates that sarbecoviruses related to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 have circulated around Western China and Southeast Asia for millennia, spreading at similar rates as their horseshoe bat hosts. "Horseshoe bats have an estimated foraging area of around 2-3 km and a dispersal capacity similar to the diffusion velocity we estimated for the sarbecoviruses related to SARS-CoV-2," said co-senior author Simon Dellicour, Ph.D., head of the Spatial Epidemiology Lab at Université Libre de Bruxelles and visiting professor at KU Leuven. The analysis further revealed that the most recent sarbecovirus ancestors of both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 left their points of origin less than 10 years before infecting humans more than a thousand kilometres away. "We show that the original SARS-CoV-1 was circulating in Western China - just one to two years before the emergence of SARS in Guangdong Province, South Central China, and SARS-CoV-2 in Western China or Northern Laos - just five to seven years before the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan," said Jonathan E. Pekar, PhD, a 2023 graduate of the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology programme at UC San Diego School of Medicine, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
West Australian
08-05-2025
- Health
- West Australian
Origin story of COVID virus rewritten, challenging lab leak theory
New research is rewriting the origin story of the virus that triggered the deadly COVID pandemic. Challenging the idea that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak, scientists now believe they know when and where the virus first emerged. COVID, which first emerged in humans in Wuhan in central China in December 2019, is calculated to have caused up to 36 million deaths worldwide. It's believe the virus that causes it left the area where it first emerged among animals in China or northern Laos several years before jumping across to humans 2700 kilometres away in Wuhan. While the primary host of the virus was a horseshoe bat, the virus was only able to travel the distance to where the human cases were first detected by 'hitching a ride' there with other animals via the wildlife trade, according to the research published in Cell . Researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine made the finding after analysing the family tree of virus strains SARS-CoV-1, which caused the SARS pandemic of 2002-2004, and the SARS-CoV-2, which caused the COVID pandemic — mapping their evolutionary history before they emerged in humans. 'We show that the original SARS-CoV-1 was circulating in Western China — just one to two years before the emergence of SARS in Guangdong Province, South Central China, and SARS-CoV-2 in Western China or Northern Laos — just five to seven years before the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan,' researcher Jonathan E. Pekar said. Given the distances that both viruses would have had to cover so quickly, it is highly improbable that they could have been carried there via the bats alone, they concluded. Much more likely, they say, is that they were transported there accidentally by wild animal traders via intermediate host animals. 'The viruses most closely related to the original SARS coronavirus were found in palm civets and raccoon dogs in southern China, hundreds of miles from the bat populations that were their original source,' said co-senior author Michael Worobey. 'For more than two decades the scientific community has concluded that the live-wildlife trade was how those hundreds of miles were covered. We're seeing exactly the same pattern with SARS-CoV-2.' The findings challenge the view that SARS-CoV-1 emerged naturally, but SARS-CoV2 was the result of a lab leak. 'At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a concern that the distance between Wuhan and the bat virus reservoir was too extreme for a zoonotic origin,' co-senior author Joel Wertheim said. 'This paper shows that it isn't unusual and is, in fact, extremely similar to the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 in 2002.' It's hoped that by continuing to sample wild bat populations for viruses, scientists will be able to prepare for and control future outbreaks. Debate about the origins of COVID-19 has raged since the pandemic took hold in 2019-2020. The CIA said in January the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab in China than from nature, after the agency had for years said it could not reach a conclusion on the matter.
Perth Now
08-05-2025
- Health
- Perth Now
COVID shock as new findings challenge popular origin theory
New research is rewriting the origin story of the virus that triggered the deadly COVID pandemic. Challenging the idea that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak, scientists now believe they know when and where the virus first emerged. COVID, which first emerged in humans in Wuhan in central China in December 2019, is calculated to have caused up to 36 million deaths worldwide. It's believe the virus that causes it left the area where it first emerged among animals in China or northern Laos several years before jumping across to humans 2700 kilometres away in Wuhan. While the primary host of the virus was a horseshoe bat, the virus was only able to travel the distance to where the human cases were first detected by 'hitching a ride' there with other animals via the wildlife trade, according to the research published in Cell. Researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine made the finding after analysing the family tree of virus strains SARS-CoV-1, which caused the SARS pandemic of 2002-2004, and the SARS-CoV-2, which caused the COVID pandemic — mapping their evolutionary history before they emerged in humans. 'We show that the original SARS-CoV-1 was circulating in Western China — just one to two years before the emergence of SARS in Guangdong Province, South Central China, and SARS-CoV-2 in Western China or Northern Laos — just five to seven years before the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan,' researcher Jonathan E. Pekar said. Given the distances that both viruses would have had to cover so quickly, it is highly improbable that they could have been carried there via the bats alone, they concluded. Much more likely, they say, is that they were transported there accidentally by wild animal traders via intermediate host animals. 'The viruses most closely related to the original SARS coronavirus were found in palm civets and raccoon dogs in southern China, hundreds of miles from the bat populations that were their original source,' said co-senior author Michael Worobey. 'For more than two decades the scientific community has concluded that the live-wildlife trade was how those hundreds of miles were covered. We're seeing exactly the same pattern with SARS-CoV-2.' The findings challenge the view that SARS-CoV-1 emerged naturally, but SARS-CoV2 was the result of a lab leak. 'At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a concern that the distance between Wuhan and the bat virus reservoir was too extreme for a zoonotic origin,' co-senior author Joel Wertheim said. 'This paper shows that it isn't unusual and is, in fact, extremely similar to the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 in 2002.' It's hoped that by continuing to sample wild bat populations for viruses, scientists will be able to prepare for and control future outbreaks. Debate about the origins of COVID-19 has raged since the pandemic took hold in 2019-2020. The CIA said in January the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab in China than from nature, after the agency had for years said it could not reach a conclusion on the matter.
