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The Rich Man (Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526) woodcut (detail)
Today’s post features three of our favorite topics: crowns, serpents, and China! But, alas, as sometimes happens, these themes have combined in a terrible manner to make frightening headlines around the world. The past two decades have seen the emergence of strange flu-like respiratory viruses from Asia. The most infamous was SARS-CoV which emerged from China in 2003, but there was a sequel in the two thousand teens, MERS-CoV, which seems to have originated in Arabia by jumping species from camels. Now the world’s communicable disease experts are once more on high alert as a new respiratory virus has been identified. The new new virus is going by the name 2019-nCoV and it causes similar symptoms to SARS: unlucky humans infected with the virus suffer severe inflammatory response which can lead to (sometimes fatal) respiratory complications.
The virus has been traced back to Hubei to the city of Wuhan, one of the most ancient cities of China. Wuhan is also the largest city of central China with a population of 11 million people! So this explains the China angle, but what about crowns and snakes? that sounds like Russian folktale territory!
A Diagram of a Coronavirus
It turns out that 2019-nCoV is a coronavirus, a category of virus which takes its name from the appearance of the virion as scanned by an electron microscope. Tiny knobbed spicules emerge from the caplets of coronaviruses which make the round structures superficially resemble the royal headdress (particularly the classical knobbed crown of Medieval Europe).
Coronaviruses are highly zoonotic–meaning they can easily be transmitted from animals to humans. Sars was first thought to originate from Asian palm civets (although it seems the poor civets may ultimately have been a vector). At this juncture scientists are starting to trace 2019-nCoV back to many-banded kraits (Bungarus multicinctus) a black and white striped elapid snake of coastal and central China. People are not making out with kraits (which is good, because the snakes are super venomous) but the poor kraits are apparently popular as exotic cuisine. Edipemiologists have pinpointed the origination of 2019-nCoV as the Wuhan seafood wholesale market, which sells all sorts of animals slated for the table, including many-banded kraits.
This conclusion surprises me, since cold-blooded snakes are not a normal virus vector (in fact the word “never” might be applicable). However, with SARS, the palm civets turned out not to be the ultimate source of the disease. The civets were eating horseshoe bats which were the original source of the virus. Perhaps these snakes play a similar intermediary role (I can easily imagine nocturnal predatory kraits eating bats).
People should not eat primates or chiropterans for reasons of public health (eating such close cousins strikes me as morally opprobrious anyway, although admittedly, I am spoiled and haven’t had to subsist as a hunter gatherer). Maybe they shouldn’t eat kraits now either. Undoubtedly virologists, epidemiologists, and doctors will keep working to figure out the precise relationship between people, kraits, bats, and 2019-nCoV. Hopefully the scientists from the United States who should be dealing with this emerging plague have not all had their position eliminated by budget cuts to the NIH (although our dolt president has probably already tried to appoint 2019-nCoV as the director of the CDC). Anyway, stay safe out there and we will figure this all out before summer. It’s never the one you see coming, and the Chinese, at least, are getting better at public health measures.
ferrebeekeeper 