Washington: Monkeys found in Asia harbour diverse viruses which are known to cause infectious gastroenteritis or diarrhoea in humans, a new study of nearly 900 nonhuman primates in Bangladesh and Cambodia has found. The research is the first to show evidence of human astroviruses in animals, and among the earliest to demonstrate that astroviruses can move between mammalian species, researchers said.
“If you are a bat, you have bat astrovirus, but if you are a monkey, you could have everything,” said Lisa Jones-Engel, from the University of Washington National Primate Research Primate Centre and a co-author of the study. Astroviruses from a number of species, including human, bovine, bird, cow and dog, were detected in monkeys. This “challenges the paradigm that AstV (astro
