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
very closely related to the original SARS coronavirus, but it emerged separately from the bat reservoir.
Correct, and that's a big worry.
We've seen the lessons of history in places like South America, what happens when a virus gets into a population that has no prior experience to it and no build-up of immunity, and the effects of things like smallpox, which is a DNA virus,
or measles and things can be absolutely devastating in naive populations.
And you have to imagine that when measles, for example, first emerged in humans, which is probably about the time we started living in cities, that it was equally devastating way back in time.
So yes, a new virus to which we have no prior immune experience is clearly a potential hazard.
I think anything that sheds light on the kinds of ecological and evolutionary processes that lead to the appearance of a new virus in the human population has got to help.
But what I should say is that what we're describing here is patterns.
The actual emergence of a new virus is almost always a series of actually quite unusual events.
And the origins of SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID is a very good example of that.
We don't have actually a clear picture of exactly what happened there.
But whatever it was, it was clearly a very unusual series of events.
That makes this whole business extremely difficult to predict and often very surprising.
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