LOS ANGELES: A new study has suggested multiple transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 from deer to humans based on analysis of samples taken from the animal, reported Xinhua.
The researchers, several of whom work for the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Department of Agriculture, collected 8,830 respiratory samples from free-ranging white-tailed deer from 26 US states and Washington between November 2021 and April 2022.
They identified 282 deer infected with Covid-19 and 34 different lineages of the virus in the samples, including those belonging to the Alpha, Gamma and Delta variants that were common earlier in the pandemic and the Omicron variant that dominated cases recently.
Evolutionary analysis showed these white-tailed deer viruses originated from at least 109 independent spillovers from humans, which resulted in 39 cases of subsequent local deer-to-deer transmissions and three cases of potential spillover from white-tailed deer back to humans.
The findings suggested that multiple SARS-CoV-2 lineages were introduced, became enzootic, and co-circulated in white-tailed deer, according to the study published in the scientific journal Nature. – BERNAMA-XINHUA
