According to modern medicine, there are four different coronaviruses that have proven responsible for what humans refer to as the common cold. Recently, however, a team of researches has traced at least one of those coronaviruses to camels and that humans contracted it directly from them.
The findings were a bit of a shock to the scientific community as it seems that camels may be responsible for a variety of assorted human illnesses. The reason for the surprise was that such science didn’t discover that viruses could be transmitted from species to species until the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) leaped from camels to humans back in 2012.
The lead researcher on the project, Christian Drosten of Bonn, Germany’s University Hospital, said that, “In our MERS investigations, we examined about 1,000 camels for coronaviruses and were surprised to find pathogens that are related to the human common cold virus in almost 6% of the cases.”
To further test their hypothesis, the researchers ran inter species molecule comparison tests between human, camels and bats. Science is already aware that viruses are capable of leaping from bats to humans. They wanted to test to see if the viruses were of a similar nature in each of the species tested. Turns out that virus wasn’t similar in camels and humans but it was exactly the same and it jumped from humans to camels at some point in our combined histories.
The researchers actually went and isolated the virus in the camel and actually saw the virus implant itself into the human cells. No only do the researchers hope this will lead to finding the causes, and perhaps a cure, for the common cold, but they believe it might lead to a further understand of, and cure for, the MERS virus. The MERS virus can cause serious, and many times fatal, respiratory infections in humans.
The researchers also discovered that the camel virus had greatly mutated so that it could more easily spread from human to human. The MERS virus, thus far, has been unable to do that. Because, they reason, the immune system in humans is fairly capable of combating the camel common cold virus, it is hoped that it will be able to do the same against the more deadlier MERS strain.
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