An article in the November 7, 2011 issue of TIME magazine entitled "Virus Hunter" caught my eye as we discussed HIV tranmission in class. The article highlights an organization, Global Viral Forecasting (GVF), and its founder, Nathan Wolfe, who aim to prevent new pathogens from spreading from animals to humans, stopping deadly pandemics before they start. Wolfe has set up projects in Africa, Southeast Asia and southern China, which are all hot spots where humans and wild animals intermingle and new viruses can leap from one species to another.
In 1998, Wolfe published a paper that raised the possible links between the hunting of wild animals, a popular source of protein in Central Africa, and the spread of emerging infectious diseases. Viruses make the leap between species when bodily fluids are shared, which tends to happen when one animal hunts, kills and eats another. Wolfe's goal is to collect blood samples from bush meat hunters and their prey to find out what microbes are out there. GVF distributes filter paper to villages throughout the country and when hunters make a kill, they squeeze a few drops of blood from the animal onto the paper, noting what they butchered, when and where.
In 2004, Wolfe and his colleagues found evidence that simian foamy virus (SFV) had spread to Cameroonian hunters, a novel primate retrovirus from the same genetic tree that produced HIV - so called because of the way it makes infected cells appear under a microscope. SFV hasn't been connected to any known symptoms. However, this discovery was proof for Wolfe that his organization, GVF, was effective in finding new viruses that could possibly trigger pandemics in the future. He hopes that identifying these new viruses before they spread will inspire a switch from chasing pandemics to predicting and preventing them.
I was intrigued by this story and thought it was worth sharing. Unfortunately, to access this story online you have to be a TIME subscriber, but I'm including the link to the story, just in case you are a subscriber:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2097962,00.html
The cut infected hunter theory doesn't explain why the virus only started to spread in the last century. The communities where HIV are beleived to have been crossed over to humans were very isolated and seculded. That is until Europe's colonization. The other theory is that the polio vaccinations that happened shortly after the use of the reusable syringe (these occured in teh '50s) is what spearheaded the spread of HIV in the end of the last century.
ReplyDeleteThis is an intriguing find. If these meat hunters are able to provide samples, that would be an excellent tool to prevent the spread of potential deadly viruses. How does Wolfe screen for the microbes? I am curious after receiving the blood, what is the process of microbe identification and future screening against viruses.
ReplyDeleteInteresting posting Brittni. Inter species transmission, here animal to human is considered in general as rare. But when it happened with a lethal virus that could be transmitted person to person such as SARS, the fatality will be so frightening. Therefore Global Bio-surveillance system would be very useful here.
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