There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Cat-ching Covid-19
A British cat has tested positive for the coronavirus — but why should we care about SARS-CoV-2 infections in animals? SCIENCE AND SOCIETY explain
Cats, dogs, tigers, lions, minks, monkeys, hamsters, ferrets, tree shrews, mice, and fruit bats can catch Covid-19, whilse pigs and chickens appear resistant
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
CONVENTIONALLY, the “silly season” doesn’t begin until August. So the news on Monday that a pet cat in Britain tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 came slightly too early.
Still, most media reporting threw it in as a relatively light-hearted piece of Covid-19 news, without addressing the underlying science. The cat apparently caught the disease from its owners, and displayed mild symptoms.
But if cats can catch Covid-19, what about other animals? SARS-CoV-2 is thought to have originally entered humans from bats, based on its very high genetic similarity to known bat coronaviruses (claims about pangolins being an intermediate host do not currently have a great deal of support, although it is possible). This clearly shows that at least three species can catch SARS-CoV-2 and other closely related coronaviruses. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Many viruses are able to infect multiple host species. In fact, to date SARS-CoV-2 transmission from humans to animals has been reported in cats, dogs, tigers, lions and minks. Alongside this, experimental research (where animals are deliberately infected) suggests that the list of animals susceptible to Covid-19 also includes monkeys, hamsters, ferrets, tree shrews, mice, and fruit bats. Animals which appear resistant include pigs and chickens.
Understanding why some animals are susceptible to Covid-19 but not others means understanding how SARS-CoV-2 attacks human cells. A virus such as SARS-CoV-2 must use our cellular machinery to reproduce.
The genome of SARS-CoV-2 is made not of DNA (like the human genome) but of RNA, a different sort of nucleic acid that can be more rapidly turned into proteins.
To produce proteins from our genome, our cells must first make RNA from DNA, and information in this RNA is then used to make proteins using cellular machinery. Unfortunately, that last part of the process means that when viral RNA gets inside a cell, that very same cellular machinery can be used to make more copies of the virus.
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