Kenya hunts for next deadly virus
… with giant swabs and grumpy camels
MACHAKOS - Kicking and grunting under the restraint of three men, the camel makes its displeasure known as Kenyan veterinarian Nelson Kipchirchir swirls a giant swab in the nostril of the grumpy dromedary.
It turns out camels don’t much like being tested for coronavirus either.
But the research is critical to advance understanding of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) - a far deadlier cousin of Covid-19 that scientists fear could cause the next global pandemic.
The fear is this virus - which has circulated among camels, and to a lesser extent, their owners in Kenya for some time - could mutate, and a new strain could spread beyond herding communities into the general population.
So Kipchirchir has little choice but to risk the wrath of the cantankerous 300-kilogramme, two-metre high camel to collect crucial nasal and blood samples.
“Sampling every animal is difficult in the sense that you never know what’s going to happen... if you are going to do the wrong thing then that is when it can get more difficult in the sense that it can kick you, it can bite you,” said Kipchirchir at Kapiti plains in southern Kenya.
On this foggy morning, one camel handler gets a violent kick from one of a dozen of the testy creatures who underwent the ordeal at the 13 000-acre Kapiti ranch.
Kapiti belongs to the InternationalLivestockResearch Institute (ILRI), headquartered in Nairobi, and its research station on the ranch where wildlife, cattle and sheep are studied by scientists.
ILRI began researching camels in Kenya in 2013, a year after the appearance in Saudi Arabia of MERS, a coronavirus which kills an estimated 35% of those it infects, with some 850 deaths recorded, according to the World Health Organisation.
MERS is a zoonotic virus, believed to have transmitted from bats to camels, which causes similar symptoms to Covid-19 in humans: fever, coughing and respiratory difficulties. The emergence of Covid-19, which has killed almost three million people worldwide in 16 months, has sharpened focus on the next virus which could jump from animals to humans, or in the case of MERS, mutate to become even more transmissible.
WHO experts believe Covid-19 jumped from bats to humans via an intermediary animal which has not yet been identified. According to WHO, some 60% of infectious diseases in humans have a zoonotic origin. The UN’s science advisory panel for biodiversity, called IPBES, warned in 2020 that pandemics will grow more frequent and deadly due to environmental destruction and climate change which are leading to increased contact between humans, livestock and wild animals. IPBES warned of up to 850 000 viruses which may be able to infect people, with five new diseases breaking out among humans every year - any one of which has the potential to become a pandemic.
“There is a renewed interest in anything to do with viruses, anything to do with zoonotic diseases because of the whole Covid issue,” said Eric Fevre, a specialist in infectious diseases with ILRI and the University of Liverpool in Britain.