Mother Jones: As for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus causing the current COVID-19 pandemic, a study released in June by Chinese researchers found that pigs are at least theoretically susceptible: They have lung and kidney cells that can be invaded by this particular pathogen. But laboratory attempts to infect pigs with it have so far not succeeded. “Given that the COVID-19 pandemic is still progressing and SARS-CoV-2 strains are constantly evolving,” they wrote, “we need to keep monitoring and evaluating the possibility of pigs to become intermediate hosts” of the pathogen. Gray finds the prospect of hog-adapted SARS-CoV-2 daunting. As they do for flu, pigs could emerge as what disease researchers call a “reservoir” for the pathogen—a large host population that keeps the pathogen circulating, giving it more opportunity to infect people. “My chief concern is that the current SARS-CoV-2 virus adapts to commercial hogs, becomes amplified in them, and causes widespread infections, increasing the risk of the virus moving from the pigs to infect humans who have not been previously infected,” he said. He expressed an even darker possibility: The “remote chance” that if it does manage to enter the pig population, it could mutate into something different, yet another “novel coronavirus” that would require a whole new scramble for a vaccine.
Source:
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/08/industrial-hog-farms-are-breeding-the-next-pandemic/
