Death of a zoo hippopotamus underscores the species’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 CDCgov EIDjournal covid coronavrius COVID19 SARSCoV2
By Dr. Priyom Bose, Ph.D.Feb 16 2023Reviewed by Danielle Ellis, B.Sc. A recent Emerging Infectious Diseases study investigated the death of a hippopotamus at a zoo in Hanoi, Vietnam. Interestingly, this study detected the presence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 virus in the hippopotamus. SARS-CoV-2 is the causal agent of the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.
Based on the protocol provided by the World Health Organization , the samples were analyzed using real-time PCR to detect SARS-CoV-2. The liver, lung, spleen, and intestine samples tested positive with varying cycle threshold values. For instance, Ct values for lungs were 26.67, spleen 33.53, liver 31.8, and intestine 36.96. These tissues were not studied histologically.
Multiple alignments were performed using the genomic sequence of the dead hippopotamus and three human SARS-CoV-2 strains. This analysis was conducted with representative nucleotide sequences of SARS-CoV-2 and betacoronaviruses, which were obtained by GenBank.
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