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We believe that they are isolated and rare events, but the reality is that we live surrounded and inhabited by viruses and that their passage from animals to humans is not as strange as we think. That doesn’t mean you should panic, because most have no public health impact, but understanding their dynamics makes it easier to understand how the next pandemic might emerge.
Between 2017 and 2019, a group from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) tested nearly 700 people in rural Myanmar communities. Of all of them, 12% had antibodies against various types of sarbecovirus, a type of coronavirus such as SARS-CoV-2, normally present in animals.
That does not mean that they got sick, or that undetected epidemics started: simply, at some point in their lives, these people had come into contact with these viruses and their immune systems had to fight them. This makes sense especially in communities that work in extractive industries or that hunt wild animals that are reservoirs of these pathogens.
It is a more common contact than we think, although it almost never has a direct impact on public health. However, understanding in detail how virus “spillovers” happen from the animal world to humans can give us clues about the tools we have to avoid future crises such as Covid-19.
First, by monitoring the communities that interact the most with virus reservoirs, understanding which ones may be more adapted to human-to-human transmission, and analyzing where the risk lurks. Second, avoiding as much as possible this uncontrolled interaction between humans and animals that often involves practices such as illegal mining or deforestation.
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