#virus evolution

We have early humans to thank for modern day genital herpes. Scientists using paleovirology data have found that our ancestors may have harboured and passed on both herpes and cold sores due to their unhygienic methods of processing and eating raw meat.

A VARIETY of bat has helped the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic to evolve for decades, according to an international team of researchers.

Two Scots teams joined experts from other countries to trace back the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

And it's thought their findings could help prevent future pandemics from the same lineage.

David L Robertson, professor of computational virology at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, said the findings suggest "other viruses that are capable of infecting humans are circulating in horseshoe bats in China".

The cave-dwelling mammals eat insects and have been linked to coronaviruses for several years.

In its newly-published work the team found the lineage of viruses that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to diverged from other bat viruses from about 40 to 70 years ago.

The first case of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was reported in the city of Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and has since frantically spread across every continent except Antarctica. With number of affected patients and deaths continuing to spiral at a breakneck pace, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic on 11th March, 2020.

Speculations regarding the COVID-19 as being engineered in a lab are running rampant in the scientific community, but the analyses of genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses suggest evidence of natural origin.