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welcome to another MedCram lecture one of the things that's in the news and
hopefully goes away real soon is the corona virus epidemic from 2019 as it
turns out it started on the last day of 2019 and has been with us in 2020 let's
talk a little bit about corona virus that virus that seems to have come from
Wuhan China let's talk a little bit about what's going on and the updates so
it seems as though this virus came from as we mentioned Wuhan China they've
seemed to have pinpointed this to an animal market in fact a number of the
people that were hospitalized and we'll talk about that article in The Lancet
came from this animal market and as of January 25th 2020 they estimate about
1300 people have been infected and about 41 people to date as of January 25th
have died and of course this number is expected to go up where is it spread to
well other than China and Asia this has spread already to Australia France and
the United States specifically two cases one in Chicago a woman in Chicago and a
man in Washington State and we'll talk more about that we expect that to go up
but what really is going on with a corona virus and why is this one so
different so we've known about corona viruses for a long time it's an RNA
virus so we know that and let's face it there's our there's corona viruses all
over the place in humans and they usually cause the common cold what's
unusual about this one is that this one seems to have jumped from one that is
already in an animal to that being in a human so there's tons of corona viruses
that infect animals but what has seemed to have happened here for the first time
as this one has jumped into a human that a human hasn't seen before and how could
that happen well it could be from a mutation and
that's typically what happens is there's a mutation in the protein in this virus
that allows it to bind to human proteins and that
allows the virus to get inside of the cells of humans and if it can replicate
then it can spread throughout that human body and then perhaps spread to another
human body so what needs to happen there has to be a mutation and that mutation
is already there in the animal and then there has to be close contact with that
animal either living with that animal or eating that animal to get that mutated
virus that normally lives in an animal into the human being so when that virus
then gets into the human being it's got to be able to replicate so that there's
more viruses and then it has to be able to spread to another human being and
that is what's gonna cause an epidemic so how does that happen well there's got
to be replication as we just said and they believe that that virus can
replicate inside the human and then how does it spread to another human as
opposed to just another animal spreading it to another human well the way that
you get an epidemic is with replication occurring inside that person that index
infected person and then it spreads how would it spread well it could spread by
airborne so that's why you'd want to wear a mask or close contacts so a loved
one contaminated surfaces so that's why you'd have to wash your hands very
carefully or rarely fecal contamination but these are the things that you can
attack to prevent the spread of this virus but we've seen this before and
where have we seen this corona virus type of thing happening before well you
all may remember SARS back in 2002 this was from bats which is where the virus
was infecting a mammal called civets and then they being eaten or living close to
humans fortunately we haven't seen any more infections since 2004 but that was
a big thing back in 2002 then MERS which have to do with the Middle East have to
do with camels viruses that lived in the camel and if you ate the camel or drank
the camel's milk you could get this type of infection now
the new one is humans with this infection called n Co V which is what
they're calling it now so n Co V is the new coronavirus that's coming out of
Wuhan China 2019 and that has gone into humans but the question is who did it
come from what is the host so what they did was
they sequenced this virus in the Journal of medical virology and we'll put a link
to this article in our description below so you can see it what they did was they
sequenced this RNA and they compared it to 200 other RNA virus coronaviruses
that are known to infect animals and the one they came up with which was a match
that was pretty close was one in snakes and so what their conclusion was and we
don't know that this is in fact true but this was their conclusion was that in
the wuhan animal market there must have been a snake that had a mutated corona
virus which they're now calling n co v somebody either ate it or was close to
it or somehow got contact with it and that virus just started to replicate
inside of that person and that person spread it and as we'll see in The Lancet
article which will also put a link to in our description below
they found a whole family that had this virus that were hospitalized and we'll
talk about the symptoms and the mortality and things of that nature here
coming up in our second video this is what they think is going on in China
with a corona virus and this is big news right now because millions and millions
of people are quarantined in China as I'm making this video so in our next
video we'll talk about the symptoms and what they're doing for treatment
vaccines and what you can do to prevent you getting this corona virus thanks for
joining us
you