CityU veterinary and biomedical scientists join hands to tackle This current health crisis calls to mind the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which ravaged Hong Kong in 2003 and which remains deeply entrenched in the psyche of Hong Kong people. While SARS was thought to be passed to people from palm civet cats, which had themselves been infected by a chain of animals with an origin in bats, the novel coronavirus is believed to have possibly originated from wild animals sold at a seafood market in Wuhan, where according to some Chinese experts, pangolins may have acted as the intermediate host. As the only veterinary medicine college in Hong Kong, JCC and its experts are contributing to collective efforts to combat this emerging and zoonotic infectious disease on all fronts.
Doom and gloom has enveloped Hong Kong since the start of 2020. A new coronavirus, designated SARSCoV-2, has swept Hong Kong, with newly confirmed cases reported each day. People have often been seen stocking up on surgical masks and exchanging ideas on social media on how to stay safe. As medical experts begin research on vaccines to deal with the novel coronavirus, the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences (JCC) is also standing at the forefront, its veterinary and biomedical scientists ready to fight the epidemic together with the Hong Kong people.
Genome research of the novel coronavirus Professor Sheng Chen, Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health and JCC’s Associate Dean (Research), is a leading scholar in biomedical sciences. Being actively involved in medical research related to pneumonia, he started to investigate the outbreak in its initial stage. He utilized the whole genome sequence of COVID-19 to perform comparative genetic and functional analysis of the human SARS virus and coronaviruses recovered from different animals. Phylogenetic analysis of the coronavirus in different species indicated that COVID-19 is a new type of bat coronavirus.
賽馬會動物醫學及生命科學院 I 2020 春季
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