The new coronavirus from China is starting to slowly spread. Another new/undiscovered disease waiting to infect and claim lives.
To someone with knowledge on medicine, particularly epidemiology, how did diseases like SARS, MERS-COV, Swine Flu, and this new coronavirus get formed?
How do we contain them and how do we cure them as well?
And why does it seem that many kinds of diseases emerge from China?
Black plague was said to have originated from there
In: Biology
A virus is almost life. It has DNA that uses host cell machinery to make copies of the virus. Like other forms of life, it evolves from generation to generation, both random mutations and recombination if the cell has more than one virus inside it.
New viruses are defined by humans studying disease when the new version is sufficiently different from other versions.
Once it’s been determined that there is a new virus out there, doctors start working on a cure/vaccine/… . We’re more successful with some than others. The common cold is very flexible and we’re not been able to cure it. Influenza is better, we make flu shots every year for what we predict the most common 3-4 strains will be; which works imperfectly but it’s better than nothing.
A lot of new pathogens aren’t *new*, they’re new at infecting us. They’re an evolutionary step from something that infected something else, like a bird or pig, into something that can infect humans.
One of the reasons why you see this happen in places like Southern China is that this jump typically isn’t some random sort of thing, it happens from having a lot of interaction between humans and other species. On top of that, it is a chance based thing, so the more interactions and the more individuals, the more likely a jump is to occur.
So in some areas you have a lot of people trading/keeping a lot of livestock and wild animals, and using the same land/water supply as those animals. This doesn’t only happen in China, and it isn’t the only way for a ‘new’ disease to pop up, but it is a really efficient way.
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