Researchers at the University of Missouri, USA, said that millions of mice living in New York City are susceptible to infection with “Covid-19”, as part of research that seeks to find out if the virus is “evolving” and to trace the possibility of its transmission to humans from these rodents.
Like humans, rodents have proven susceptible to multiple types of coronavirus, both original and mutated such as Omicron, including high levels of infection in the upper and lower airways. And in 2021, a World Health Organization report concluded that the coronavirus was "likely" to be transmitted from bats to humans, via an unknown animal.
Researchers at the University of Missouri studied whether New York rats could become infected, given the city's huge population of about 8 million, along with other large populations widely distributed in other metropolitan areas across the United States.
"It is necessary to determine whether wild animals can be infected on a large scale, to track how the virus evolves," said the study, published in the journal "mBio" of the American Society for Microbiology.
Study author Dr Henry Wan said: “To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to show that SARS-CoV-2 variants (the virus that causes COVID-19) can cause infection in populations of wild mice in a large metropolitan area in the US.”
How was the study done?
With permission from local officials, the researchers conducted two rat traps in and around sites around New York's sewer systems, mostly in the Brooklyn borough.
Biologists collected and treated samples from 79 mice captured between September and November 2021, and found that 13 of them (16.5 percent) were infected with COVID-19. The researchers estimate that means more than 1.3 million infected mice in New York. This can help track whether the virus is "evolving," Wan said, adding: "The results reinforce the common role that humans and animals can play during an epidemic."
He continued: “It is important that we continue to increase our understanding so that we can protect human and animal health, as our findings highlight the need for further monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 in groups of mice, to determine whether the virus is circulating in animals and developing into New strains that could pose a threat to humans."
Previous research warned that "as community transmission wanes, COVID-19 among animals may become an increasingly important potential source for reintroduction of the virus into humans".
However, the supposed zoonotic origins of the virus (from animal to human) have been called into question in recent weeks, after the FBI director revealed that the CIA believed it "most likely came from a leak in a Chinese laboratory". This theory has been promoted since the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, more than 3 years ago, but the WHO's official position is that it remains "extremely unlikely".
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