Why It Matters: Deer could be a source of new variants.
There is no evidence that deer play a major role in spreading the virus to humans, but the transmission of the virus from people to animals raises several public health concerns.
First, animal reservoir could allow viral variants that have disappeared from human populations to persist. Indeed, the new study confirms prior reports that some coronavirus variants, including Alpha and Gamma, continued to circulate in deer even after they became rare in people.
New animal hosts also give the virus new opportunities to mutate and evolve, potentially giving rise to new variants that could infect people. If these variants are different enough from those that have previously circulated in humans, they could evade some of the immune system’s defenses.
Background: Scientists have found signs of widespread infection in deer.
Researchers at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, in collaboration with other government and academic scientists, began looking for the coronavirus in free-ranging white-tailed deer in 2021, after studies suggested that the animals were susceptible to the virus.
In that first year of surveillance work, the scientists ultimately collected more than 11,000 samples from deer in 26 states and Washington, D.C. Nearly a third of the animals had antibodies to the coronavirus, suggesting that they had previously been exposed, and 12 percent were actively infected, APHIS said on Tuesday.
For the new Nature Communications paper, scientists from APHIS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Missouri sequenced nearly 400 of the samples collected between November 2021 and April 2022. They found multiple versions of the virus in deer, including the Alpha, Gamma, Delta and Omicron variants.
Then, the scientists compared the viral samples isolated from deer with those from human patients and mapped the evolutionary relationships between them. They concluded that the virus moved from humans to deer at least 109 times and that deer-to-deer transmission often followed.
The virus also showed signs of adapting to deer, and the researchers identified several cases in North Carolina and Massachusetts in which humans were infected with these “deer-adapted” versions of the virus.
What’s Next: Surveillance will continue.
APHIS has expanded its surveillance to additional states and species.
Many questions remain, including precisely how people are passing the virus to deer, and the role that the animals might play in sustaining the virus in the wild.
This means, you take one article, and you use the article distribution system. It will generate thousands of unique versions of your article, and publish those unique articles to hundreds of websites that are related to your niche.
Take a look at our comprehensive guide to the best and most popular information ebooks and products available today on Detoxing, Colon Cleansing, Weight Loss and Dating and Romance. They are all in one spot, easy to find and compere to make a quick selection for the product that best fits your needs or wants.
So browse through a category and make your preferred selection and come back here to read more choice articles and get a few more helpful tips on ways to help your enhancement.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. “saubiosaubiosuccess.com is a participant in third party affiliate and advertising programs; The Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, Awin network, and other affiliate advertising programs are designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees and commissions by advertising and linking to products on other sites and on Amazon.com. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc, or its affiliates.”
We use anonymous cookies and various 3rd-party services to optimise and to offer you a better, more personalised, browsing experience with advanced accessibility enhancements.
Dismiss
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
