A Covid-like virus lurks inside British bats

Bats in the UK are harboring a Covid-like virus that may spread to humans, experts have warned.

The never-before-seen coronavirus would require few “adjustments” to pose a threat to humans, according to the research team, which included a prominent government adviser.

The pathogen, called RhGB07, was one of two new viruses discovered by bat hunters.

But the other, also from the same family as Covid, showed no signs of being able to infect people.

Scientists have insisted that the risk to society from RhGB07 is low.

Some believe Covid jumped to humans from bats in China – possibly via an intermediate species such as a raccoon dog or pangolin.

There is increasing concern about zoonotic diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans and their potential to cause pandemics.

Some experts have pointed to climate change and increasing urbanization leading to habitat loss and hence increased movement of animals through environmental degradation as some factors that could contribute to zoonoses.

British and Swiss scientists who worked on the new study said their working discovery shows the importance of monitoring and testing wildlife populations for viruses.

Such programs are touted as one of the few lines of defense against zoonotic outbreaks, giving scientists a head start in identifying pathogens with pandemic potential.

Locations where samples were taken from infected bats were not shared.

Although in a preprint published on Biorxiv, the team identified three hotspots where bat species mix.

These were areas near Bristol, Birmingham and Brighton.

The research team also included Professor Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London, a member of SAGE, the panel of disease experts that guided No10 through the Covid pandemic.

In the main part of the study, faecal samples from 16 species of bats living in Great Britain were tested for viruses.

Laboratory analyzes uncovered nine viruses, two of which were entirely new to science.

These were found in specimens of greater and lesser horseshoe bats with viruses designated RhGB07 and RfGB02.

These viruses come from the same broad family of pathogens as the Covid virus SARS-CoV-2.

The scientists, who came from institutions such as University College London, the Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London, then tested the two viruses for their ability to infect human cells.

They found that only RhGB07 had the potential to bind to a protein commonly found on the surface of human cells.

However, the team judged that this was only “suboptimal”.

For comparison, the scientists said the binding ability of the spike protein of RhGB07, the part of the virus that infects cells, to the ACE-2 receptor was “17 times less” than that of Covid.

It is believed that Covid itself has evolved to be even more contagious than measles.

However, they noted that studies on similar bat viruses had found that even a single mutation can significantly increase this ability.

Further analysis of RhGB07’s spike protein also revealed that it was just one mutation away from developing the furin cleavage site found on the Covid virus.

Some studies have credited this structure with improving Covid’s ability to infect people.

Scientists have even mutated the virus to artificially induce the change – but insist the experiment poses no danger to the public.

Professor Francois Balloux, an infectious disease expert at University College London and author of the study, said no “functional” furin cleavage site emerged.

Professor Balloux wrote on Twitter trying to forestall allegations the team had been involved in controversial “gain of function” research.

Experts in this field of science can give viruses new abilities that could make them more dangerous to humans.

“None of the experiments was dangerous in any way. We didn’t use live virus. All laboratory experiments were carried out with absolutely safe “pseudoviruses,” he said.

Pseudoviruses are artificially made for laboratory experiments, allowing scientists to add parts of real viruses, such as spike proteins, to them.

However, they can only infect cells once – meaning they can’t infect humans in the same way that real viruses can.

In their final analysis, the scientists also found that the new viruses have the ability to recombine with other viruses.

They said this ability could theoretically accelerate their adaptation to infect new hosts, such as in a hypothetical co-infection with a person already infected with Covid.

“Hence, the possibility of future host hopping in humans cannot be ruled out, even if the risk is low,” they wrote.

They added: “Given the current health burden of coronaviruses and the risk they pose as possible causative agents of future epidemics and pandemics, surveillance of animal-borne coronaviruses should be a public health priority.”

The scientists also said that while the risk of a general member of the public contracting a bat virus was low, their findings highlighted that researchers and wildlife workers working with the mammals should follow strict biosecurity practices.

‘Bats perform important roles in ecosystems worldwide, including services such as arthropod suppression, pollination, and seed dispersal,” they said.

“Recent studies have shown that human-induced stressors such as habitat loss and land-use change can be important drivers of the spread of zoonoses from wildlife and that bat culling is ineffective in minimizing transmission between species.

“It is therefore critical that future approaches to zoonotic risk reduction adopt an integrated ecological conservation approach that includes maintaining legal protections rather than destroying wildlife and their habitat.”

All bats in the UK, including their roosting sites, are protected by law, with four species on the verge of extinction and two others listed as threatened.

Anyone who intentionally kills or injures bats or destroys their roosting or breeding grounds faces six months in prison and an unlimited fine.

Bats in Asia have been implicated as one of the possible origins of the original Covid virus, although some scientists believe it was then modified by experiments by Chinese scientists at the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory.