By Ruairi Walsh
The coronavirus outbreak that started in China last month has so far left 170 people dead and has many people worried that it could spread to the UK, with the Government saying that as of yesterday they had tested 161 people “of which 161 were confirmed negative and 0 positive.”
In an exclusive interview, leading expert on coronaviruses Professor Julian Hiscox, Chair in Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool said that this is nothing new: “We’ve known for years about corona viruses. They predominantly cause infections in animals, many years ago I used to work on a chicken corona virus which had a death rate of about 10 or 15% in chicken populations.”
“They used to be called the backwater of virology because they didn’t cause disease in humans or if they did it was a very mild disease. Then in 2003 the SARS coronavirus came along in China and that stood for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, as the name suggests you can tell if you have got it because you start getting severe respiratory disease. So it’s very, very similar to what you would get with a bad strain of influenza virus and at the time it was very hard to tell the two apart.”
Is it the same with the new Virus? “Yes so the new virus is very much related to SARS, in my laboratory we work on MERS which is Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus which originated in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and, again, that causes severe respiratory disease. But when we look at the what we call the genetic sequence of this new virus its about 90% identical to the bat SARS virus i.e SARS that originated in bats, that they study in the Wuhan institute of virology.
How quickly could the virus spread? “So if you’ve got something like the Measles virus, that actually spreads between people very quickly and it has what we call an N number of six, so for every one person it will infect six other people, so that’s why it’s hard to stop. When we think about respiratory infections, we don’t necessarily get them from breathing other people’s air. What tends to happen is that I will sneeze, my sneeze all the snot in it, goes on to a surface, someone will come along and touch that surface and then pick their nose, scratch their eyes or rub their teeth and that’s how we tend to get respiratory infections. So how infectious is it? It’s infectious but provided we don’t touch people or surfaces, which is obviously hard to do, then it’s not transmissible.”
So in that sense is it similar to the flu or a cold? “It’s exactly like influenza virus or how we get common colds, it’s just it’s symptoms compared to most respiratory viruses are worse and obviously it has a death rate associated with it.”
The Chinese government has taken drastic action to stem the spread of the virus quarantining the Wuhan area is this an appropriate response? “It looks to me that the steps are proportionate and appropriate in that I didn’t realise but I think during the lunar New Year there were 400 million people on the move in China and the surrounding region. Now as I said earlier we work on MERS and we worry about MERS because of the holy pilgrimage of Hajj with about two and a half million. So you’ve got phenomenally more people moving in China so you need to shut the movement down, you need to shut people congregating together down, so what you have to do is remove contacts between people so if you can do that you can contain the outbreak.”
What advice would he give to the general public? “I think my advice would be don’t panic. Our health care authorities, in the UK, are up to speed on this virus, we have diagnostic tests available for it. They are monitoring flights from China and that’s effectively all you can do with this type of virus, the best way to contain it is to shut down what we call the transmission chain”.
Mersey Focus 