Why Does A Virus Jump From One Species To Another?

Sep 26, 2011


But, thankfully, the diseases that humans and animals share has its limits. You don't worry about catching a cold from your pet gerbil. So how might we know which diseases could make that a leap from one kind of animal to another?


Their results appear this month in the journal PLoS Pathogens.

So why should humans care? "The more susceptible your close relatives are, the more you're susceptible," Darren Obbard at the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Evolutionary Biology and one of the paper authors tells Shots. "This might suggest that if a virus can get into chimps and gorillas, it could get into us."


But your genetic relationship to other host species isn't the only predictor of how susceptible you might be to a new virus. Obbard says exposure also matters. And these days, a lot of humans — particularly those who raise livestock — live in much tighter quarters with some animals than ever before.

"For the viruses we looked at, it's true you might be more likely to catch things from chimps than cows. But we spend much more time with cows, so the next thing we want to look at is the exposure effect and the genetic effect together."

Now, one might ask, why look at this in flies? Obbard says that flies are actually handy for studying how things move between creatures. "You need a lot of host species, and I can't think of another animal where you could keep 50 different species in a lab at one time," he says.
