An analysis of viral genomes shows it is more common for viruses to jump from humans to other animals than the other way around
Animals such as rats are often regarded as disease carriers. But when it comes to the spreading of illnesses, it turns out other animals have more reason to fear us than we them.
An analysis of viral genomes has found that when viruses move between humans and other animals, in 64 per cent of cases it is humans infecting other animals rather than the reverse.Tan and his colleagues have been using a global database of sequenced viruses to study how they jump between species. There are nearly 12 million sequences in the database, but many are partial or lack data on when they were collected and from what host species.
So, the researchers narrowed down the 12 million to 60,000 high quality sequences with full accompanying data. They then created “family trees” for related viruses.Altogether, they identified nearly 13,000 viral lineages and 3000 jumps between species. Of the 600 jumps involving humans, most were from humans to other animals rather than vice versa.
The team wasn’t expecting this but in retrospect it makes sense, Tan says. “Our population size is huge. And our global distribution is basically everywhere.” In other words, a virus spreading among humans will have numerous opportunities to jump to many other species all around the world, whereas a virus circulating in a non-human species limited to one region will have far fewer opportunities.However, even when SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV and flu were excluded from the analysis, the team found that 54 per cent of jumps were from humans to other animals.
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