New Yorkers may have a new reason to loathe rats.
Researchers investigating mysterious COVID-19 mutations found signs of the virus in the city’s massive rat population — sparking concerns the disease could jump from the vermin to humans.
“We were concerned that there was a possibility that we were going to find a spillover event knowing that [COVID-19] had been detected in some other animal species,” Dr. Julianna Lenoch, national coordinator of the USDA-APHIS Center and co-author of the paper, told The Post. Finding COVID-19 in NYC rodents has sparked concerns about the disease spreading from vermin to humans.Lenoch and her team captured and tested nearly 80 Norwegian rats in Brooklyn and found that just over 16% of them had antibodies indicating that were exposed to the virus.
The team found that another rodent species commonly used for research purposes, Sprague Dawley rats, are able to be infected by the Alpha, Delta, and Omicron variants of COVID-19, highlighting the potential for transmission.The paper looking at COVID-19 and ratsIt was an attempt to identify the origins of a series of mysterious never-before-seen COVID-19 mutations found in the city’s wastewater last year by researchers at the University of Missouri, and CUNY’s Queens and Queensborough colleges.
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