A new coronavirus that usually infects canines is found in a pneumonia patient in Malaysia
- Report in the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases identifies case in 2018 among hospital patients in Sibu and Kapit
- The study also features a new approach to detect viruses and to try to prevent them from evolving into ones that cause pandemics
A new type of coronavirus that could infect humans was confirmed in at least one pneumonia patient hospitalised in 2018 in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, a medical journal reports.
The virus was the first canine coronavirus to have been isolated in a human patient, according to a paper by an international team of scientists – including those from the US, Malaysia and China – published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases on Thursday.
The virus was discovered in a project by researchers from Duke University and Malaysia studying causes of pneumonia and building viral detection capacity in Sarawak, according to Dr Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Duke.
“In the past we’ve never known a canine alphacoronavirus to cross species to man,” Gray said.
“What this suggests is that because we don’t have diagnostics that would pick up new coronaviruses in the common hospital laboratory setting, we are missing opportunities to detect pre-pandemic viruses.”