In a world still reeling from COVID-19, infectious disease researchers are eager to head off the next pandemic before it has the chance to spill over from animals to humans. But the scientific reality of pandemic prevention isn’t straightforward, and researchers have generally avoided making specific predictions about the potential of individual viruses to cause global disease.
Sometimes, though, a signal is so compelling it can’t be ignored. One such signal has prompted a group of scientists to sound the alarm about an obscure virus in wild African primates — despite the fact that neither the virus nor any of its close relatives have ever been documented in humans.
“It’s a pretty controversial prediction,” concedes Tony Goldberg, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine.
Goldberg is part of the group warning that simian hemorrhagic fever virus and its family of simian arteriviruses could pose a significant health risk to humanity should the right conditions allow it to leap from wild primates to people.
The group has demonstrated the virus’s ability to infect human cells and deftly evade the human immune system’s typical responses. They published their findings in the scientific journal Cell.
The researchers say there is no known risk to people now, and there is no guarantee the virus will make the jump from wild primates. But Goldberg and his colleagues say it’s important to understand these viruses and the risks they could pose.
Goldberg and collaborators on other campuses carried out sophisticated laboratory analyses that inform the group’s assertions. Their most recent lab work stems from a decades-long effort by Goldberg and colleagues to hunt down and describe potentially dangerous viruses lurking in wild places.
In fact, Goldberg’s field work in the forests of Uganda first identified wild strains of simian arteriviruses — strains used to understand the virus’s infectious potential in this latest research. Read more here.
Will Cushman
This article appears in the Spring 2023 issue of On Call magazine.