TONY KARUMBA
Nelson Kipchirchir takes a nasal swab. But he does not test a person, but a camel, and not for Sars-CoV-2, but for the causative agent of the respiratory disease Mers. So that the Kenyan vet can turn the test stick in the nostril of the frightened dromedary, three men have to hold the 300-kilogram animal.
But the investigation is essential for research into Mers Syndrome, which is triggered by another coronavirus and is much more deadly than Covid-19. The Mers pathogen could trigger the next global pandemic.
Kipchirchir and his colleagues fear that the pathogen, which has been circulating among camels for some time and, to a lesser extent, among their owners, could mutate and spread from the pastoral communities to the general population.
“Taking samples is difficult because you never know what is going to happen,” says Kipchirchir in the Kapiti Plain in southern Kenya. A camel is unpredictable. “If you make a mistake, it can kick or bite you.” On this foggy morning, a camel driver gets a violent kick from one of the animals that are being examined on the huge Kapiti ranch with 13,000 hectares.
Here in Kapiti, a research station of the International Livestock Research Institute (Ilri) headquartered in Nairobi, scientists study wild animals, cattle and sheep. In 2013, the Ilri began research on camels in Kenya. A year earlier, Mers broke out in Saudi Arabia. The syndrome triggered by a coronavirus has a death rate of around 35 percent among those infected.
Bats, pangolins, poultry as possible sources of disease: the Covid-19 pandemic, which killed more than 3.15 million people worldwide in 16 months, sharpened the focus on so-called zoonoses – i.e. diseases transmitted by animals. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), they make up around 60 percent of infectious diseases in humans.
Mers can also be transmitted from vertebrates to humans and probably initially jumped from bats to camels. In humans, it causes symptoms similar to Covid-19 with a fever, cough, and difficulty breathing.
The United Nations Scientific Advisory Panel on Biodiversity (Ipbes) warned in 2020 that pandemics could become more common and deadly if people, livestock and wildlife were more in contact with each other due to environmental degradation and climate change. According to this, up to 850,000 viruses can potentially affect humans. Five new diseases could break out each year, each with the potential to become a pandemic.
“There is a newly awakened interest in everything that has to do with viruses and zoonotic diseases because of the whole Covid problem,” says Eric Fevre, specialist in infectious diseases at Ilri. With around three million camels, Kenya has one of the largest populations in the world. In arid areas, they are becoming increasingly popular due to more frequent droughts.
“A camel is very important,” says Isaac Mohamed, one of the shepherds in Kapiti. “It cannot die in a drought and can do without water for up to 30 days.” At the same time, the demand for camel milk and camel meat is growing.
In 2014, a study found Mers antibodies in 46 percent of the camels examined and five percent of the camel drivers and slaughterhouse employees. “The Mers that we currently have in Kenya cannot simply be transferred to humans” – compared to the variant in Saudi Arabia, says the biologist Alice Kiyong’a. But the virus is constantly changing, emphasizes Fevre: “It’s exactly like Covid.” (SDA)