- What Is Spillover? How Animal Viruses Infect Humans | Weather.com The Weather Channel
- Bird flu: Nigeria is on major migratory bird routes, new strains keep appearing theconversation.com
- Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Is Devastating Birds, and Humans May Be Next The Daily Beast
- How to Handle the Bird Flu: America Must Prepare for the Next Possible Pandemic Foreign Affairs Magazine
- As bird flu continues to spread in the US and worldwide, what’s the risk that it could start a human pandemic? 4 questions answered theconversation.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Spillover
Heating climate could increase risk of Arctic ‘virus spillover’ | Climate Crisis News
A warming climate could bring viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of “viral spillover”, according to newly published research.
Viruses need hosts like humans, animals, plants or fungi to replicate and spread, and occasionally they can jump to a new one that lacks immunity, as seen with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scientists in Canada wanted to investigate how climate change might affect spillover risk by examining samples from the arctic landscape of Lake Hazen.
It is the largest lake in the world entirely north of the Arctic Circle, and “was truly unlike any other place I’ve been”, researcher Graham Colby, now a medical student at the University of Toronto, told the AFP news agency.
The team sampled soil that becomes a riverbed for melted glacier water in the northern summer, as well as the lakebed itself, which required clearing snow and drilling through two metres of ice, even in May — springtime in Canada — when the research was carried out.
They used ropes and a snowmobile to lift the lake sediment through almost 300 metres (980 feet) of water, and samples were then sequenced for DNA and RNA, the genetic blueprints and messengers of life.
“This enabled us to know what viruses are in a given environment, and what potential hosts are also present,” said Stephane Aris-Brosou, an associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s biology department, who led the work.
But to find out how likely they were to jump hosts, the team needed to examine the equivalent of each virus and host’s family tree.
“Basically what we tried to do is measure how similar these trees are,” said Audree Lemieux, first author of the research.
Similar genealogies suggest a virus has evolved along with its host, but differences suggest spillover.
And if a virus has jumped hosts once, it is more likely to do so again.
‘Very unpredictable’
The analysis found pronounced differences between viruses and hosts in the lakebed, “which is directly correlated to the risk of spillover,” said Aris-Brosou.
The difference was less stark in the riverbeds, which the researchers theorise is because water erodes the topsoil, removing organisms and limiting interactions between viruses and potential new hosts.
Those instead wash into the lake, which has seen “dramatic change” in recent years, the study says, as the water from melting glaciers deposits more sediment.
“That’s going to bring together hosts and viruses that would not normally encounter each other,” Lemieux said.
The authors of the research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, caution they are neither forecasting an actual spillover nor a pandemic.
“The likelihood of dramatic events remains very low,” Lemieux said.
They also warn more work is needed to clarify how big the difference between viruses and hosts needs to be to create serious spillover risk.
But they argue that warming weather could increase risks further if new potential hosts move into previously inhospitable regions.
“It could be anything from ticks to mosquitoes to certain animals, to bacteria and viruses themselves,” said Lemieux.
“It’s really unpredictable … and the effect of spillover itself is very unpredictable, it can range from benign to an actual pandemic.”
The team wants more research and surveillance work in the region to understand the risks.
“Obviously we’ve seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be,” said Lemieux.
Another Fatal Monkey Virus Could Be Poised for Spillover to Humans
Evoking parallels to HIV, authors are calling on global health community to be vigilant.
According to new research, an obscure family of viruses, already endemic in wild African primates and known to cause fatal Ebola-like symptoms in some monkeys, is “poised for spillover” to humans. The study, by the University of Colorado Boulder, was published online in the journal Cell on September 30.
“This animal virus has figured out how to gain access to human cells, multiply itself, and escape some of the important immune mechanisms we would expect to protect us from an animal virus. That’s pretty rare.” — Sara Sawyer
Although such arteriviruses are already considered a critical threat to macaque monkeys, no human infections have been reported thus far. In addition, it is uncertain what impact the virus would have on people should it jump species.
However, the authors, evoking parallels to HIV (the precursor of which originated in African monkeys), are calling for vigilance nevertheless: By watching for arteriviruses now, in both animals and humans, the global health community could potentially avoid another pandemic, they said.
“This animal virus has figured out how to gain access to human cells, multiply itself, and escape some of the important immune mechanisms we would expect to protect us from an animal virus. That’s pretty rare,” said senior author Sara Sawyer. She is a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at CU Boulder. “We should be paying attention to it.”
There are thousands of unique viruses circulating among animals around the globe, and most of them cause no symptoms in the host. Increasing numbers of these viruses have jumped to humans in recent decades, wreaking havoc on naïve immune systems with no experience fighting them off. This includes Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2003, and
For 15 years, Sawyer’s lab has used laboratory techniques and tissue samples from wildlife from around the globe to investigate which animal viruses may be prone to jump to humans.
For the latest study, she and first author Cody Warren, then a postdoctoral fellow at the BioFrontiers Institute at CU, zeroed in on arteriviruses. These are common among pigs and horses but understudied among nonhuman primates. Specifically, they looked at simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV), which causes a lethal disease similar to the Ebola virus disease. Dating back to the 1960s, it has been causing deadly outbreaks in captive macaque colonies.
According to the research, a molecule, or receptor, called CD163, is crucial to the biology of simian arteriviruses, enabling the virus to invade and cause infection of target cells. Through a series of laboratory experiments, the scientists discovered, much to their surprise, that the virus was also remarkably skilled at latching on to the human version of CD163, getting inside human cells, and quickly making copies of itself.
Like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and its precursor simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), simian arteriviruses also appear to attack immune cells. This means they can disable key defense mechanisms and take hold in the body long-term.
“Just because we haven’t diagnosed a human arterivirus infection yet doesn’t mean that no human has been exposed. We haven’t been looking.” — Cody Warren
“The similarities are profound between this virus and the simian viruses that gave rise to the HIV pandemic,” said Warren. He is now an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at The Ohio State University.
The authors stress that another pandemic is not imminent, and the public should not be alarmed.
However, they do suggest that the global health community prioritize the further study of simian arteriviruses and develop blood antibody tests for them. They should also consider surveillance of human populations with close contact with animal carriers.
An expansive variety of African monkeys already carry high viral loads of diverse arteriviruses, often without symptoms. Additionally, some species frequently interact with humans and are known to bite and scratch people.
“Just because we haven’t diagnosed a human arterivirus infection yet doesn’t mean that no human has been exposed. We haven’t been looking,” said Warren.
Warren and Sawyer note that in the 1970s, no one had heard of HIV either.
Scientists now know that HIV likely originated from SIVs infecting nonhuman primates in Africa, likely jumping to humans sometime in the early 1900s.
When it began killing young men in the United States in the 1980s, no serology test existed, and no treatments were in the works.
Sawyer said there is no guarantee that these simian arteriviruses will jump to humans. But one thing is for sure: More viruses will jump to humans, and they will cause disease.
“COVID is just the latest in a long string of spillover events from animals to humans, some of which have erupted into global catastrophes,” Sawyer said. “Our hope is that by raising awareness of the viruses that we should be looking out for, we can get ahead of this so that if human infections begin to occur, we’re on it quickly.”
Reference: “Primate hemorrhagic fever-causing arteriviruses are poised for spillover to humans” by Cody J. Warren, Shuiqing Yu, Douglas K. Peters, Arturo Barbachano-Guerrero, Qing Yang, Bridget L. Burris, Gabriella Worwa, I-Chueh Huang, Gregory K. Wilkerson, Tony L. Goldberg, Jens H. Kuhn and Sara L. Sawyer, 30 September 2022, Cell.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.09.022
New deadly Ebola-like virus that lives in monkeys in Africa is ‘poised for spillover’ into humans
Scientists fear they’ve found the next big pandemic threat — a virus that lives in African monkeys.
Simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV) causes devastating Ebola-like symptoms including internal bleeding and death.
It hijacks the immune system, disabling key defense mechanisms and breaking the body down cell by cell.
No cases have been detected in humans yet but it is ‘poised for a spillover’, according to US researchers.
By developing tests and monitoring the virus now ‘the global health community could potentially avoid another pandemic’, they said.
Scientists fear they’ve found the next big pandemic threat — a virus that lives in monkeys in Africa. It is similar to the Ebola virus (shown in stock image)
Experts at the University of Colorado Boulder are raising the alarm due to SHFV’s ‘compatibility… with humans’. In a lab study, they found virus is able to latch on to a human receptor with ease and make copies of itself
Experts at the University of Colorado Boulder are raising the alarm due to SHFV’s ‘compatibility… with humans’.
In a lab study, they found virus is able to latch on to a human receptor with ease and make copies of itself.
Senior author of the study Dr Sara Sawyer said: ‘This animal virus has figured out how to gain access to human cells, multiply itself, and escape some of the important immune mechanisms we would expect to protect us from an animal virus.
‘That’s pretty rare. We should be paying attention to it.’
In macaque monkeys, SHFV causes fever, fluid retention in the body’s tissue, anorexia, and hemorrhaging. The disease is almost always fatal within about two weeks.
The virus was first sequences in macaque monkeys in US and Russian labs in 1964
It appears to attack immune cells the same way as HIV, the precursor to which originated in a type of chimpanzee in Africa.
Author Professor Cody Warren, said: ‘The similarities are profound between this virus and the simian viruses that gave rise to the HIV pandemic.’
Reservoirs for the family of viruses that includes SHFV
He added: ‘Just because we haven’t diagnosed a human arterivirus infection yet doesn’t mean that no human has been exposed. We haven’t been looking.’
The researchers focused their work on a family of viruses called arteriviruses that typically circulate among pigs and horses but are not studied enough in non-human primates.
They zeroed in on simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV), a type of arterivirus which causes a lethal disease similar to Ebola virus disease.
It was sequenced in the 1964 after simultaneous outbreaks in US and Soviet Russian labs, likely due to introduction of captive infected African apes.
It has caused deadly outbreaks in captive macaque monkey colonies since the early 1960s.
In the last decade, several scientists have been hunting for simian arteriviruses in nature.
A broad range of African monkeys carry high viral loads of arteriviruses, often without symptoms.
Researchers have yet to determine what the natural host species is for SHFV
No human infections have been detected yet, according to the report published Friday in the science journal Cell.
The pathogen’s ability to multiply rapidly in the body has echoes of the coronavirus.
Before winter 2019, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, had never been detected in humans.
It was a novel virus believed to have jumped from bats to an intermediary animal before spilling over to humans.
The never-before-seen virus ravaged people’s inexperienced immune systems and spread unabated for months.
The same is possible for another highly contagious novel virus.
‘COVID is just the latest in a long string of spillover events from animals to humans, some of which have erupted into global catastrophes,’ Dr Sawyer said.
Covid’s ability to spread so easily among humans without ever being detected before led many high profile scientists to question whether it was the result of an accidental leak from a virology institute in the city at the epicentre of the Covid pandemic, Wuhan.
We’ll Likely Deal With More Pandemics as Earth Heats Up
As climate change permanently alters our environment, the world is increasingly opening up to new viruses—with potentially deadly consequences for us humans. A study published Thursday in Nature finds that as climate change is forcing animals to move habitats, they will increasingly come into contact with humans, and with each other, creating more and more opportunities for deadly viruses to mutate and spill over to people.
“Species are going to have to move if they want to track shifting climates,” Colin Carlson, the study’s lead author and an assistant research professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, said in an email. “When they do, they’ll meet for the first time and share viruses. Our simulations suggest that in the next half-century, this process will completely restructure the global mammal-virus network. That’s bad news for human health.”
While there’s a large body of research on how climate change can shape epidemics, a lot of that work is focused on vector-borne diseases—diseases like malaria, dengue, Zika, and yellow fever that are transferred to humans by blood-feeding insects like ticks and mosquitoes. Hardly any scholarly work has actually looked at how climate could impact how viruses jump from wild animals to humans, also known as zoonotic spillover. Between 60% and 75% of infectious diseases were initially transferred from wild animals to humans; there are currently thousands of virus species with the capacity to sicken humans silently infecting various animals, according to the paper.
The study uses a huge amount of data—on viruses and host mammals as well as on climate change and animal habitats—to create an enormous map of how the habitats of more than 3,100 mammal species might change over the coming decades. As habitats shift, chances increase that different species will cross paths more with each other and with us, and viruses and other pathogens will be along for the ride. In the 2003 SARS outbreak, for instance, research suggests that civet cats, which are eaten in China, may have acted as an intermediary host for the virus, helping it cross from bats to humans. And under a changing climate, bats especially could come into contact more frequently with different animal species, creating new opportunities for viruses to spread.
“Because they can fly, we expect bats will be able to travel the farthest and fastest, and so drive most of this process,” Carlson said.
As a result of these widening habitats, new geographic “hotspots” will emerge: places where potential epidemics and pandemics can be born. For example, ebola outbreaks have traditionally clustered in western African countries, but the study finds that by 2070, ebola outbreaks could be much more common in east Africa. “Climate change is going to create innumerable hotspots of overlap between elevated spillover risk and human populations,” Carlson said.
And we’re facing an uphill battle. The world has already warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels; the process of animals changing habitat and coming into contact with other species, Carlson explained, has already started. What’s more, mitigation, or slowing warming down, might actually exacerbate the problem.
“In extreme warming scenarios, species lose habitat so quickly they go extinct before they have the opportunity to share their viruses in new ecosystems,” Carlson said. “Mitigation slows down the speed at which their habitats move, and gives them a more manageable task—and so it’s easier to get where they’re going, and share viruses when they get there.”
It’s tough to draw a straight line between any given pandemic and climate change, since there are a myriad of factors at play with each outbreak. But this research shows that staying safe will mean keeping a much closer eye on diseases in wildlife.
“We’re committed to a world where climate change might become the dominant driver of pandemic risk (if it’s not already), even with the best-case scenario for climate change,” Carlson said. “It’s urgent that we think about wildlife disease surveillance and outbreak detection as climate change adaptation strategies.”
Omicron-Infected Deer Raise Questions About Spillover to Humans
- Nearly 20 white-tailed deer in New York were infected with Omicron this winter, research suggests.
- The virus seems widespread among US deer, raising concerns about the spillover of new variants.
- For now, scientists are hopeful that deer won’t pass the coronavirus to humans.
Vaughn Cooper sees white-tailed deer every day in his neighborhood outside Pittsburgh.
The species is common in most US states. Pennsylvania alone has around 1.5 million white-tailed deer — about 30 per square mile — while the US has around 30 million in total.
“My dog goes ripping after the deer every morning,” Cooper, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, told Insider.
Interactions between humans and deer — or deer and other animals — are a pressing concern among scientists, since the coronavirus now appears widespread in the US white-tailed deer population.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University identified nearly 20 white-tailed deer in Staten Island, New York, that were infected with the Omicron variant between December 2021 and January 2022. Their findings, which haven’t been peer reviewed, mark the first report of Omicron spilling over to wild animals. A spillover event occurs when a highly-infected population passes the virus to another species that hasn’t encountered it (or that a particular variant) before.
The US Department of Agriculture has detected coronavirus infections among white-tailed deer in 15 states, a USDA spokesperson told The New York Times on Monday. In a study published last year, Penn State researchers identified the coronavirus in about one-third of white-tailed deer sampled in Iowa between September 2020 and January 2021. Another research group found the virus in one-third of sampled deer in Ohio from January to March 2021.
“We were not expecting to find this level of widespread infection,” Suresh Kuchipudi, associate director of the Animal Diagnostic Laboratory at Penn State, told Insider. “It was quite surprising, and also quite concerning.”
Scientists worry that deer could serve as a reservoir for the coronavirus, even after COVID-19 becomes endemic in humans. In the worst-case scenario, the virus might evolve in deer to become better at evading vaccine protection, then spill over into humans as a more lethal variant.
But such a phenomenon would be unprecedented, Cooper said. Most people in the US have some protection against the virus from vaccines or natural infection, making it tough for a new variant to override our existing immune defenses.
“Could deer become a host that gives rise to successful lineages in humans? I still think it’s unlikely,” Cooper said, adding, “We’re actually becoming a harder population to invade because the leading virus is so prevalent.”
A third animal could pass the virus between deer and humans
Deer aren’t the only animals that can contract coronavirus infections.
Scientists have detected the virus in cats, dogs, ferrets, mink, pigs, and rabbits. But they’re paying close attention to white-tailed deer for a few reasons: In addition to being highly vulnerable to infection, white-tailed deer are abundant in the US and live in close proximity to humans.
“There’s no evidence that there’s anything special about deer biology that makes them a more worrisome host,” Cooper said, adding, “The major thing is that they’re everywhere. They are the classic example of changes in human and animal populations brought on by civilization that promotes spillover.”
For now, scientists don’t know whether deer can spread the coronavirus to humans — they just know that the virus is quite good at infecting deer populations. The animals live in herds, making it easy for them to transmit the virus to one another through saliva or feces.
For deer to infect humans directly, “you’d basically need to be a hunter,” Cooper said. It’s also possible that deer could pass the virus to humans through an intermediate host, such as a rodent or household pet.
“Whenever you have an animal that is widely infected and virus is circulating, they always can be a source of infection in other susceptible animals — even sometimes humans, if the conditions are right,” Kuchipudi said.
One deer in Staten Island showed evidence of reinfection
One of the most urgent mysteries is whether the same deer can be infected with multiple coronavirus variants. In that case, scientists wouldn’t hold much hope for the virus dying out in deer populations.
“If we do find that deer can be reinfected, that signals clearly for the continued circulation of the virus in these animals,” Kuchipudi said.
His preprint identified a single deer in Staten Island with high levels of coronavirus antibodies, which was also infected with Omicron. The study “hint[s] at the possibility that animals that are previously exposed could be reinfected,” Kuchipudi said, but for now, “it’s just one animal.”
Even if the virus spilled over from deer to humans several years from now, Cooper said he’s hopeful that genomic sampling and wastewater surveillance could detect it right away, before it “catches fire.”
“It’s legitimate to be concerned about the possibility of this, but the great news is that surveillance is so strong, generally, that we will see this when it happens,” he said.
As far as historical patterns go, he added, it would be rare for a spillover variant to jump-start a new wave of the pandemic.
“I’m unaware of new lineages refueling an existing pandemic like this, except for flu,” Cooper said. “Flu is clearly driven by continuing exchange back and forth between humans and pigs and fowl.”
But Kuchipudi cautioned that scientists still have more to learn about whether white-tailed deer are strong reservoirs for mutations.
“We still haven’t quite grasped the extent of the problem,” he said, adding, “We need to be cautious about concluding if it’s likely or unlikely. The honest answer is we don’t know yet.”
Raw meat led to ancient animal-to-human disease spillover
Hacking up raw meat ended so poorly for this Neanderthal that it’s significant to humanity’s evolutionary history.
Scientists have confirmed one of the earliest known instances of a disease jumping from an animal to a human, an event formally known as “spillover.” HIV and COVID-19 are also both examples of spillover disease.
The fossilized bones of a Neanderthal man have revealed “the earliest secure evidence” of an animal infecting a person with a “zoonotic disease,” according to a study published last month.
The man, known as the “Old Man of La Chapelle,” was discovered in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908, CNN reported. His remains have proven a goldmine to researchers over the decades, and his bones continue to reveal new information.
The first ever near-complete Neanderthal skeleton to be found, he is believed to have passed away approximately 50,000 years ago, either in his 60s or late 50s. While a 2019 study put forth evidence that he’d had advanced osteoarthritis in his hip and spine at the time of his death, the new research shows that in fact he was suffering from a disease passed on to him from an animal, likely while he was either cooking or butchering raw meat.
“Rather, we found that some of these pathological changes must be due to inflammatory processes,” the head of the University of Zurich’s Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group and internal medicine specialist Dr. Martin Haeusler told CNN. “A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”
Today, brucellosis is a widespread disease, generally contracted via contaminated animal products (including unpasteurized milk), airborne agents or direct contact with an infected animal.
More recent, 5,000-year-old human skeletons have also shown evidence of the disease, but the Old Man of La Chapelle represents, for now, the oldest known case of it.
Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat
Researchers were reexamining the fossilized bones of a Neanderthal who was found in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. The “Old Man of La Chapelle,” as he became known, was the first relatively complete Neanderthal skeleton to be unearthed and is one of the best studied.
More than a century after his discovery, his bones are still yielding new information about the lives of Neanderthals, the heavily built Stone Age hominins that lived in Europe and parts of Asia before disappearing about 40,000 years ago.
However, during that reanalysis, Dr. Martin Haeusler — a specialist in internal medicine and head of the University of Zurich’s Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine — realized that not all the changes in the bones could be explained by the wear and tear of osteoarthritis.
“Rather, we found that some of these pathological changes must be due to inflammatory processes,” he said.
“A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”
Zoonotic disease
It’s also one of the most common zoonotic diseases — illnesses that are transmitted from animals to humans. They include viruses like HIV and the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Brucella has a wide range of symptoms, including fever, muscular pain and night sweats, Haeusler said. It can last from a few weeks to many months or even years. Long-term problems resulting from the disease are variable but can include arthritis pain, back pain, inflammation of the testes — which can lead to infertility — and inflammation of the heart valves known as endocarditis, which Haeusler said was the most common cause of death from the disease.
The paper said the case was “the earliest secure evidence of this zoonotic disease in hominin evolution.”
The disease has also been found in Bronze Age Homo sapiens skeletons, which date back to around 5,000 years ago.
Diet
Brucellosis is found in many wild animals today, and Haeusler said that the Neanderthal man likely caught the disease from butchering or cooking an animal that had been hunted as prey. Possible sources include wild sheep, goats, wild cattle, bison, reindeer, hares and marmots — all of which were components of the Neanderthal diet. However, the paper said that the two large animals Neanderthals hunted, mammoths and woolly rhinoceros, were unlikely to be the disease reservoir — at least based on the animals’ living relatives, in which brucellosis has been largely undetected.
Given the man lived to what must have been a very old age for the period, Haeusler suspected that the Neanderthal may have had a milder version of the disease.
An early reconstruction of the skeleton depicted the man with a slouching posture, bent knees and the head jutted forward. It was only later that scientists realized the skeleton had a deforming kind of osteoarthritis and perhaps was not a typical Neanderthal.
Haeusler said the study he published in 2019 showed that, even with the wear and tear from degenerative osteoarthritis, the “Old Man of Chapelle” would have walked upright. The man also had lost most of his teeth and may have had to have been fed by other members of his group.
Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat
Researchers were reexamining the fossilized bones of a Neanderthal who was found in a cave near the French village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. The “Old Man of La Chapelle,” as he became known, was the first relatively complete Neanderthal skeleton to be unearthed and is one of the best studied.
More than a century after his discovery, his bones are still yielding new information about the lives of Neanderthals, the heavily built Stone Age hominins that lived in Europe and parts of Asia before disappearing about 40,000 years ago.
However, during that reanalysis, Dr. Martin Haeusler — a specialist in internal medicine and head of the University of Zurich’s Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine — realized that not all the changes in the bones could be explained by the wear and tear of osteoarthritis.
“Rather, we found that some of these pathological changes must be due to inflammatory processes,” he said.
“A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis.”
Zoonotic disease
It’s also one of the most common zoonotic diseases — illnesses that are transmitted from animals to humans. They include viruses like HIV and the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Brucella has a wide range of symptoms, including fever, muscular pain and night sweats, Haeusler said. It can last from a few weeks to many months or even years. Long-term problems resulting from the disease are variable but can include arthritis pain, back pain, inflammation of the testes — which can lead to infertility — and inflammation of the heart valves known as endocarditis, which Haeusler said was the most common cause of death from the disease.
The paper said the case was “the earliest secure evidence of this zoonotic disease in hominin evolution.”
The disease has also been found in Bronze Age Homo sapiens skeletons, which date back to around 5,000 years ago.
Diet
Brucellosis is found in many wild animals today, and Haeusler said that the Neanderthal man likely caught the disease from butchering or cooking an animal that had been hunted as prey. Possible sources include wild sheep, goats, wild cattle, bison, reindeer, hares and marmots — all of which were components of the Neanderthal diet. However, the paper said that the two large animals Neanderthals hunted, mammoths and woolly rhinoceros, were unlikely to be the disease reservoir — at least based on the animals’ living relatives, in which brucellosis has been largely undetected.
Given the man lived to what must have been a very old age for the period, Haeusler suspected that the Neanderthal may have had a milder version of the disease.
An early reconstruction of the skeleton depicted the man with a slouching posture, bent knees and the head jutted forward. It was only later that scientists realized the skeleton had a deforming kind of osteoarthritis and perhaps was not a typical Neanderthal.
Haeusler said the study he published in 2019 showed that, even with the wear and tear from degenerative osteoarthritis, the “Old Man of Chapelle” would have walked upright. The man also had lost most of his teeth and may have had to have been fed by other members of his group.
China Evergrande Spillover Risks Can Be Controlled, Central Bank Says
China’s central bank sought to ease concern about potential contagion from
China Evergrande Group’s
debt crisis, saying the risk of the developer’s problems spilling over into the financial system was controllable.
Zou Lan, head of financial markets at the People’s Bank of China, on Friday said Evergrande had blindly diversified and expanded, Chinese state media outlets reported. That had led to its operations and finances seriously deteriorating, Mr. Zou said. But he added that the risk exposure of individual financial institutions to the developer isn’t big.
The company recently reported the equivalent of more than $300 billion of total liabilities, including $89 billion of debt.
Mr. Zou said relevant authorities and local governments are currently resolving the situation based on rule-of-law and market-oriented principles.
He said they were urging Evergrande to step up its asset disposals and resume projects to protect the interests of home buyers, and that financial authorities, the housing ministry and local governments would cooperate to provide funding support so projects could restart.
The central bank official added that Evergrande’s problems are an individual phenomenon and that land and housing prices have remained stable, which he said were signs of a generally healthy real-estate industry.
The central bank hasn’t directly addressed Evergrande’s challenges since the developer fell behind on dollar-bond payments last month, though it has said it would support the housing market. In August, it and other financial regulators summoned Evergrande executives to a meeting, telling them the company needed to resolve its debt issues without destabilizing the property and financial markets.
Home sales by China’s major developers fell sharply in September, a typically strong month. Fantasia Holdings Group Co., another Chinese developer, earlier this month said it failed to make a dollar bond payment, adding to the malaise surrounding China’s highly indebted property companies.
Separately, Hong Kong’s Financial Reporting Council said it was investigating whether recent financial statements by Evergrande had adequately addressed so-called going-concern issues, or warnings made in accounts if there are question marks about a company’s ability to stay afloat.
In a statement Friday, the audit watchdog said it had “identified questions about the adequacy of reporting on going concern” in the Hong Kong-listed company’s most recent annual and first-half accounts and in the auditor’s report by PricewaterhouseCoopers for 2020. The regulator said it had begun an investigation of PwC’s audit and an inquiry into Evergrande’s recent accounts.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that PwC hadn’t included a going-concern warning when it signed off on Evergrande’s 2020 accounts. However, the bar to issue such warnings is high, and any concerns about the company’s financial health may have been insufficient to trigger such a notice, the Journal reported.
—Grace Zhu contributed to this article.
Write to Elaine Yu at elaine.yu@wsj.com
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the October 16, 2021, print edition as ‘China Plays Down Risks From Evergrande Crisis.’