It wasn’t rabies, poison or pesticide poisoning. Neither a meteorological cause nor any disease known until then. Something had killed 500 bats in Lloviu’s Asturian cave and we didn’t know what. Researchers quickly realized that the falling of thousands of bats in southern Europe was also not unique to that cave. What was going on? We just isolated the culprit.

Asturian ‘Ebola’. For months, researchers were completely lost, and three years later, Antonio Tenorio pressed the key after reading a study that suggested fruit bats could be the living reservoirs (“reservoirs”) of Ebola. The scientific community raised its hand when comparing samples of Asturian bats with the Ebola virus and finding genetic coincidences close to 75%.

To begin with, according to the current classification, “a virus is Ebola if it is more than 50% similar to it” and to continue, because Spain does not have the facilities to work with such pathogens. Quickly, researchers from the Carlos III Institute of Health and CSIC formed alliances with Columbia University and Roche laboratories. This is how we found the Lloviu virus (LLOV).

“We’re out of samples”. However, we did not learn much about the virus in question. It was concluded that it does not affect humans, but as no live patients with this virus (neither human nor animal) have been documented and, on the other hand, cannot be confirmed as Gustavo Palacios (one of the researchers). all sample material was consumed. The original samples did little more than diagnose it and ask a very simple set of questions. For something else.

All right, we’ve isolated him.. Now, a research team coordinated by Gábor Kemenesi of the National Laboratory of Virology at the University of Pécs (Hungary) has isolated the virus from the blood of a bat living in Hungary. This above all confirms that Lloviu is not an Asturian rarity and that “the data support the role of bats, particularly ‘Miniopterus schreibersii’, as hosts of LLOV in Europe”.

What do we know so far? Most importantly, in vitro, Lloviu appears to have the potential to infect and replicate human cells. On the other hand, the study showed no antibody cross-reactivity with Ebola. In other words, current vaccines against the latter are useless if LLOV jumps to humans.

The next big epidemic is still around the corner. For now, that doesn’t mean danger is imminent or anything like that. However, it “raises concern about possible widespread transmission in Europe and encourages urgent pathogenicity and antiviral studies.” After all, it’s the only global health emergency, despite the fact that infectious disease outbreaks tripled (and the diseases that cause them doubled) between 1980 and 2010. There has been a coronavirus caused by a new and unknown infectious agent. And we would have to have a long and bitter discussion about whether we had the elements to suspect its dangerousness.

The rest were caused by influenza virus (a virus we’ve known for at least 2400 years), polio (identified in 1789 but already affected the ancient Egyptians), Ebola (discovered in 1976), and a subspecies of Zika. (known since 1947). It is precisely such “known” viruses that we must watch closely. The next big epidemic will likely come from them.

Image | James Waincoast