Mark Woolhouse
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Mark Woolhouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In other words, we haven't found any other animal that they infect.
The great majority of them are also capable of infecting other animals.
Almost always those are mammals, but some of them in birds.
Influenza A is a very important example in birds.
And very few in other kinds of animals.
So it does seem to be that the mammal viruses are particularly an issue for humans if they
Spread in mammals, it makes them more likely to spread in humans.
SARS-CoV-2, the natural reservoir for that, is likely to be horseshoe bats.
The virus has been studied and traced in those bats in southern China, but there's a gap on the timescale of virus evolution.
It looks to be about five years.
We can see where the virus was circulating to about five years before it appeared in humans, but we don't know where it was in those intervening five years.
So I certainly don't think we can sit back and relax.
There's two or three new viruses being discovered in humans every year.
When they're first discovered, nobody knows their epidemic or pandemic potential, so we have to treat them as a potential public health risk.
And one of the things this catalogue does is identify the characteristics of these viruses that make it more or less likely that it will be a public health problem in humans.
And one of those characteristics, which we actually published back in 2019,
is what you want to be looking for is a virus that is closely related to one that we know can spread in human populations, but has emerged separately from an animal reservoir.
And that seems to be quite a consistent predictor of whether a new virus poses a threat to humans.
And I mentioned that we published it in 2019 because that is a perfect description of the ancestry of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID pandemic.
That's exactly what it did.
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