an autodidact meets a dilettante…

As mentioned previously, there are lots of coronaviruses. The four most commonly found in humans have these memorable names: 229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1. These are humanly-borne viruses that seem to be more interested in increasing spread than increasing pathogenicity. We seem to have developed enough of an immunity from these common coronaviruses for them not to be a major problem. It’s perhaps the new strains that jump from bats to humans via an intermediate species – civets in the case of SARS, dromedary camels (probably) in the case of MERS – that are most likely to be pathogenic. Researchers are on the hunt for the intermediate carrier in the case of 2019-nCoV. Snakes were first suggested, but this has now been dismissed. The most recent candidate has been the pangolin, after research from the South China Agricultural University on the genome sequences of pangolin viruses found them to be 99 percent identical to those in coronavirus patients, but this is unpublished, unverified data at present.

Civets, pangolins? These are just some of the more or less exotic wild animals that some Chinese people like to consume or use for ‘medicinal’ purposes. Traditional Chinese medicine, aka medicine that doesn’t work, has a lot to answer for. Health experts are now recommending that the Chinese government clamp down on this practice. The presence of these creatures in open Chinese markets is disturbing. A prohibition was apparently put in place by the Chinese government just last month, a matter of shutting the stable door, but how well this will be enforced is a question.

Over the past 24 hours I’ve been coughing up a storm, and I’m due to work tomorrow. Medications are reducing the inflammation, and I note that wearing a common or garden surgical mask, which we see everywhere now, will not help. To quote from Live Science:

Coronaviruses can be transmitted between humans through respiratory droplets that infected people expel when they breathe, cough or sneeze. A typical surgical mask cannot block out the viral particles contained in these droplets, but simple measures — such as washing your hands, disinfecting frequently touched surfaces and objects, and avoiding touching your face, eyes and mouth — can greatly lower your risk of infection.

Of course I don’t have such a virus, and there are no known cases of it in Australia, though at least five Australians on a cruise ship off Japan have been confirmed as having contracted it. But as to surgical masks, the point is that viruses are much smaller than bacteria (on average about 1000 times smaller). They’re not cells, with their full complement of DNA, but strands of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) encased within protein. They’re parasitic on hosts, unlike bacteria, and they’re generally pathogenic – we don’t have ‘good’ viruses as we have good bacteria. They can live outside of hosts for a limited period of time – hence the need for hand-washing and general cleanliness. Viruses in general may take a variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from the recently-identified DNA-based pandoraviruses at 1000 or so nanometres (1 micrometer) down to 20 nanometres or less. As to coronaviruses in particular (the largest of the RNA viruses) their structure and their ‘spike proteins’ will be glanced at in the next post.

References

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5457962/

https://www.thoughtco.com/differences-between-bacteria-and-viruses-4070311

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-pangolin-is-now-a-suspect-in-the-coronavirus-outbreak

https://www.livescience.com/face-mask-new-coronavirus.html