New SARS-Like Virus Infects Both Human and Animal Cells

sciencehabit writes "A SARS-like virus discovered this summer in the Middle East may infect more than just humans. The pathogen, a close cousin to the one that caused the 2002 to 2003 SARS outbreak, may also be able to infect cells from pigs and a wide range of bat species, researchers report today (abstract). The findings may help public health officials track the source of the outbreak and identify the role of wild animals and livestock in spreading the virus, researchers say."

Comments

Question for this crowd

[dorpus]

I am a statistician. In light of this year's early flu epidemic, I am tasked with modeling ER flu counts as a function of time.

When I plot the residual graph (observed - expected), I get upward spikes lasting about a week, corresponding to epidemics of particular strains. But there are also downward spikes lasting about a week. They occur at random, independent of the upward spikes. So what do I call such downward spikes? I've searched around but there is no antonym for "epidemic".

Re:Question for this crowd

[dgatwood]

Academic?

Re:Question for this crowd

[damn_registrars]

We have no way of knowing anything at that level of detail

True, though based on the situation you may be able to estimate some of them fairly well.

what percent of the population as a whole was infected

If you are the only hospital in the area, you can presume that all the severe cases are coming to you. You could then presume that a certain percent of infections are severe enough to warrant hospitalization and estimate the total infected from that. Obviously not a perfect number but a useful one nonetheless.

how many were vaccinated

This one also varies with the population pool you are dealing with. If you are the primary source of vaccination then you have a pretty good idea of how many are vaccinated. On the other hand if you have 20 clinics in your area, plus 4 drugs stores and 2 discount retailers that all do vaccination as well, then your numbers won't describe the vaccination rate well on their own.

The government does not have such information either

Correct. Of course, you do know who makes the vaccines, and you could use their numbers as a high limit for vaccinated people across the country.

What you describe is for hypothetical simulations.

Hypothetical situations are described to make models for the real world when real world data is not sufficient.

I'm just working with ER managers to enable efficient resource allocation:

Which is very important work as well. I'm just suggesting you may be able to get some reasonable estimates of the bigger picture from not a lot more data and work.

how many flu patients do we expect today? Where are we relative to seasonal baseline?

Also worth knowing. And with some additional work you should be able to project fairly well where you are on the trajectory, as well (unless, of course, you are one hospital in a community of millions, at which point the numbers likely break down).

In other words, I think what you describe is very interesting. I'm just suggesting that for many cases you may be able to use it to model some things that you had not (yet) described. I'm an informatics guy, I enjoy mining data like that...

cpt. obv?

[v1]

Virus Infects Both Human and Animal Cells

well, last I checked, humans were animals?

Re:cpt. obv?

[treeves]

Of course, you realize that in context, 'animal' means 'non-human animal', but you still had to be pedantic.

That is very rapid publication

[damn_registrars]

The full text (available for free from anywhere - hooray for open access!)) states that the patient reported in June of this year. Paper was submitted on October 24, accepted November 1, and published November 20.

This also shows how good next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have become. They were able to sequence and assemble an entire virus genome in ~4 months or (likely) less, from a single infected human.

Newsflash...

[EmagGeek]

... Humans ARE animals, you idiotic dipshits.

I guess ...

[PPH]

... its time to quit having sex with the livestock.