NewsDesk @bactiman63

Evidence of human-to-dog transmission of monkeypox virus

Published in The Lancet this week, researchers from France describe a human-to-dog monkeypox transmission.

12 days after symptom onset, their male Italian greyhound, aged 4 years and with no previous medical disorders, presented with mucocutaneous lesions, including abdomen pustules and a thin anal ulceration. The dog tested positive for monkeypox virus by use of a PCR protocol adapted from Li and colleagues that involved scraping skin lesions and swabbing the anus and oral cavity. Monkeypox virus DNA sequences from the dog and patient 1 were compared by next-generation sequencing (MinION; Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Oxford, UK). Both samples contained virus of the hMPXV-1 clade, lineage B.1, which has been spreading in non-endemic countries since April, 2022, and, as of Aug 4, 2022, has infected more than 1700 people in France, mostly concentrated in Paris, where the dog first developed symptoms. Moreover, the virus that infected patient 1 and the virus that infected the dog showed 100% sequence homology on the 19·5 kilobase pairs sequenced.

The report continues:

The men reported co-sleeping with their dog. They had been careful to prevent their dog from contact with other pets or humans from the onset of their own symptoms (ie, 13 days before the dog started to present cutaneous manifestations).

Bat SAR-CoV spillovers

A study published this week in Nature Communications provides the first known estimate of the SARS-CoV spillover risk from bats to people.

Our estimate that a median of ~66,000 people are infected with SARSr-CoVs each year in Southeast Asia suggests that bat-to-human SARSr-CoV spillover is common in the region, and is undetected by surveillance programs and clinical studies in the majority of cases. While our results suggest significant levels of spillover, many of the diverse viral strains that infect people in the region each year may not be able to replicate well in people, cause illness, or be transmitted sufficiently among people to cause an outbreak.

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