Two deadly viruses that have gone extinct
Sparking fears of yet another pandemic, a virus has recently been discovered from a frozen lake in Russia. Known as ‘zombie virus’, it has been on earth’s surface for the past 48,500 years, revealed experts. This recently-traced virus, both prehistoric and mysterious, has been found by French scientists. However, its effects are still largely unknown and remains to be analysed in lab. Wondering why it has remained hidden so long? Because it was underneath a permanently frozen region that has only recently been thawed due to adverse effects of global warming. While we let the scientists do their work and wait for further updates on this newly-found virus, let us take a look at two deadly viruses that no longer exist.
Sars or SARS-CoV-1: A close cousin of the coronavirus
When the world was hit with coronavirus in 2019 but still didn’t know much about the virus, the name Sars suddenly made it to the headlines. After all, COVID-19 was also known as SARS-CoV-2. However, Sars or SARS-CoV-1 has long been extinct. An acronym for ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’, the Sars virus made people suffer from difficult breathing and in turn blocking all their respiratory tracts, often turning fatal.
Okay, but when did this virus originate? Well, that would be in February 2003, at the same place where COVI-19 had emerged: China! Deemed as ‘a strange contagious disease’ by the Beijing-based WHO office, it had claimed the lives of 100 people within a week of its arrival. Now, the next question is, how did it arrive? Well, experts suggest it was found in exotic meats (from racoons, snakes, deer, badgers, palm civets, doves, rabbits and so on) served across Guangdong, a coastal province in southeast China.
As the story goes, the meat was often cut and dispatched on the spot, slightly away from where the people ate. In fact, beheaded and disembowelled animals just remained in the open, which were carriers of the Sars virus. Two years down the line, as many as 10000 people were victims of the virus, with nearly a thousand dead. It used to spread as fast as coronavirus through respiratory droplets due to close human contact.
Sars disappeared almost as abruptly as it had emerged by the end of January 2004. Wondering how it happened? Well, it was the result of well-conducted contact-tracing. It is nothing but identifying and isolating individuals or groups who have recently come in contact with an infectious virus and treating them instantly, even before the symptoms start showing. Fortunately, the incubation period of Sars was rather long. This made it easy for contact tracers to locate and quarantine those affected. The rest was done by the eventual vaccine development.
Smallpox: The virus that left behind pockmarks
When we hear the term pox, we often think about chickenpox that is a common childhood disease (rarely affects adults as well) caused by the contagious virus named varicella zoster and better known as HHV-3. Now, thanks to preventive vaccines, one may or may not get chickenpox. But did you know there also existed another type of pox called smallpox? Well, it went extinct in the late 1970s. Smallpox was an acute, highly infectious and often fatal disease that was caused by the variola virus. It often left behind pockmarks (a scar or mark left behind on the skin caused by a pus-filled swelling). Do you know how the world eradicated it? By a massive-scale global and determined vaccination drive, that included both preventive as well as curable shots (mostly the prior). But that’s the smallpox of the modern times. Turns out, another strain of the virus also existed in the 2nd century AD and had got lost during wars and other challenges, such as plagues and famines. Unfortunately, smallpox was one of history’s deadliest diseases, and had killed approximately 300 million people in 1900 alone.