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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Magnus Maximus, post: 4387747, member: 73473&quot;]Unfortunately most novel disease outbreaks we encounter are zoonotic in nature, that is they spread from animals to humans.</p><p>I’m not entirely surprised by the emergence of&nbsp; SARS 2 Coronavirus, as conditions in those wet markets easily facilitate transmission of fluids and tissue&nbsp; between animals and humans. It sort of reminds me of the West African Ebola outbreak in the mid 2010’s that started with a child catching the virus from a bat and was made worse by the bushmeat markets.</p><p><br /></p><p>Viruses are not by definition alive as they cannot replicate on their own; the term I was taught was “Obligate intracular parasite”. Though they are RNA or DNA based, they do not have many of the repair systems that bacteria or human cells do and are thus more likely to mutate. Most mutations to a virus do nothing, some are harmful and limit or stop their virulence while others allow it to jump to a new host. This process is made easier by how close the virus’s host organism is related to the new host. Example: A Chimpanzee is closer related to a human being than a slug is, so it would in theoretically be much easier for a chimpanzee virus to jump to a human.</p><p>See</p><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simian_immunodeficiency_virus" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simian_immunodeficiency_virus" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simian_immunodeficiency_virus</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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