A new coronavirus has been discovered in bats in Brazil, sharing similarities with the deadly MERS virus, but its risk to humans remains still unclear, scientists say. Researchers from São Paulo said the newly discovered novel coronavirus has a resemblance with the Middle East respiratory syndrome virus, or Mers-CoV, which was first identified in 2012 in Saudi Arabia and has killed over 850 people, with cases of infection reported across more than two dozen countries. According to scientists, experiments to determine its potential to infect humans are scheduled for later this year.
“Right now, we aren’t sure it can infect humans, but we detected parts of the virus’s spike protein, suggesting potential interaction with the receptor used by MERS-CoV. To find out more, we plan to conduct experiments in Hong Kong during the current year,” said Bruna Stefanie Silvério, first author of the article published in the Journal of Medical Virology. Scientists say the new coronavirus discovered in Brazil has a genetic sequence that is about 72 percent similar to the Mers-CoV genome.
Scientists say they would also be conducting further experiments in Hong Kong this year at high-biosecurity laboratories to determine the risks posed by the new virus to humans. “This monitoring helps identify circulating viruses and risks of transmission to other animals, and even to humans,” said Ricardo Durães-Carvalho, another author of the study. Scientists said they screened 423 oral an.