Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

To pre­vent the evo­lu­tion of an­oth­er vi­ral ill­ness such as the nov­el coro­n­avirus (Covid-19) there is an un­mis­tak­able need for virus­es which orig­i­nate in an­i­mals to be stud­ied, es­pe­cial­ly in Trinidad and To­ba­go where there is a cul­ture of eat­ing "wild meat" and with a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion liv­ing with­in close prox­im­i­ty to forest­ed ar­eas.

This is the sen­ti­ment of Pro­fes­sor in Vet­eri­nary Vi­rol­o­gy of the School of Vet­eri­nary Med­i­cine (SVM), UWI Dr Christo­pher Oura at an ed­u­ca­tion fo­rum for med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers host­ed by the T&T Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion on the Covid-19 sweep­ing the Chi­nese main­land and now pen­e­trat­ing 25 oth­er coun­tries.

The Covid-19, up to yes­ter­day, in­fect­ed 51,857 peo­ple glob­al­ly and killed 1,666 in main­land Chi­na and is be­lieved to be a zoonot­ic dis­ease orig­i­nat­ing in a live mar­ket in Wuhan with­in the Hubei province.

How­ev­er, of­fi­cials and sci­en­tists are still try­ing to pin­point which an­i­mal it orig­i­nat­ed and mu­tat­ed in. And ac­cord­ing to Dr Oura in his pre­sen­ta­tion to the prac­ti­tion­ers: "three out of four new and emerg­ing virus­es in hu­mans have come through an­i­mals."

"This is one of the things we need to take se­ri­ous­ly to un­der­stand the base­line of which virus­es are present in our an­i­mals and our wildlife...it is on­ly by un­der­stand­ing the base­line - what you have - you can then fol­low through whether there's a risk of these virus­es jump­ing species (like the Covid-19 did)," Dr Oura told Guardian Me­dia.

Cur­rent­ly, he said, the SVM is con­duct­ing re­search in­to this area and of par­tic­u­lar con­cern are in­fluen­za type virus­es.

"There are in­fluen­za virus­es in pigs...in cat­tle...in hors­es and in hu­mans and they have the propen­si­ty (ten­den­cy) to change be­cause of the na­ture of how they mu­tate. We have in­fluen­za virus­es in Trinidad...but we have to keep a very close eye on them to know how they've changed and whether they've changed."

Oura al­so in­di­cat­ed that the il­le­gal im­por­ta­tion of an­i­mals as is of­ten done from South Amer­i­ca through Venezuela al­so puts the coun­try at risk.

"There is a dan­ger that those types of virus­es would be brought across through the il­le­gal trans­port of an­i­mals and we all of a sud­den get them in Trinidad," he said.

He stressed the need to mon­i­tor an­i­mals as of­ten­times, the mu­ta­tions to the virus oc­cur while it is in them. He told the prac­ti­tion­ers dur­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion that it's at this stage the virus­es need­ed to be com­bat­ed and stompped out. He cit­ed that the eco­nom­ic and so­cial costs would be less at this stage com­pared to when it be­comes trans­mit­table to hu­mans.

Oura, how­ev­er, not­ed "we have been look­ing and we don't have any dan­ger­ous in­fluen­za virus­es in Trinidad like in Chi­na...but we need to keep con­stant sur­veil­lance for them"

Oura is a qual­i­fied vet­eri­nary sur­geon with a PhD in Vi­ral Im­munol­o­gy an d has many years re­search ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing pre­dom­i­nant­ly on vec­tor-borne vi­ral and pro­to­zoal dis­eases. He has worked in sev­er­al coun­tries around the world and be­gan work­ing in T&T in 2012. In 2017, he re­ceived the UWI Vice Chan­cel­lor award for his re­search.