A Catalog for All the World’s Viruses?

published on September 5, 2013 in The New York Times

Viruses have a knack for ambush. Time and again, they have struck our species without warning, producing new diseases. H.I.V. burst on the scene in the early 1980s, and it took years for scientists to figure out that it had evolved from a chimpanzee virus in the early 1900s. In 2003, a previously unknown bat virus in China began to cause SARS in humans. Today we are in the midst of yet another ambush, as a new virus called MERS is infecting people, mostly in in Saudi Arabia. Scientists have yet to definitively pin down its origin, although preliminary evidence points to another species of bat.

We might be able to take away this element of surprise if we had a catalog of all the viruses lurking in mammals. As soon as a mysterious epidemic broke out, scientists could turn to the catalog to figure out where the virus came from, potentially gaining some crucial clues to the virus’s biology. But few scientists have ventured to build such a catalog, perhaps because there seemed to be such a vast number of viruses to contend with.

“No one’s really been addressing this question, even though it seems like such a fundamental one,” said Simon J. Anthony, an associate research scientist at Columbia University and a researcher at EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based scientific research organization.

Carl Zimmer
The New York Times
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BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

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A Catalog for All the World’s Viruses?

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