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EDITORIAL article

Front. Microbiol., 01 December 2023
Sec. Infectious Agents and Disease
This article is part of the Research Topic Coronaviruses from the One Health Perspective View all 5 articles

Editorial: Coronaviruses from the One Health perspective

  • 1Department of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, Long Island University, Brookville, NY, United States
  • 2Institute of Fundamental and Applied Research, National Research University TIAME, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
  • 3Medical School, Central Asian University, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
  • 4College of Animal Biotechnology, Guru Angad Dev Vety and Animal Sciences University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India

Editorial on the Research Topic
Coronaviruses from the One Health perspective

Three coronaviruses have emerged in the past two decades [severe acute respiratory syndrome-1 (SARS-CoV-1), the Middle East respiratory coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and the SARS-CoV-2]. They represent ideal examples of the One Health concept (Hemida, 2019; Hemida and Ba Abduallah, 2020). This could be due to sharing common ancestors in bats and integrating some intermediate hosts as a reservoir for some of them. The dynamic changes in coronaviruses on the genomic level due to recombination and poor proof-reading capability of the coronavirus polymerases make possibilities for emerging new viruses/strains or even variants of the currently circulating strains. Minimizing the viral spread of some pathogens with pandemic potential from bats to intermediate host/vector will reduce the chance of any future potential pandemics.

Identifying the potential reservoir/es of SARS-CoV-2 is essential to prevent future infections and safeguard our food supply's security and stability. We approved and published four research articles for the current Research Topic. Al-Khalaifah et al. explored the relationship between avian CoV and relation with mammalian SARS-CoV2. The authors found that the avian and mammalian coronaviruses exhibit genetic and antigenic distinctions, making it improbable for poultry to serve as a vector for transmitting these coronaviruses. Fortunately, no substantiated evidence has indicated the potential cross-species transmission from human to bird despite the established transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from bats to humans.

The impact of bacterial coinfection with COVID-19 infection was assessed in the hospital. The study was the result of contradicting findings from the various studies that pointed out that the proportions of bacterial coinfection were very low (Garcia-Vidal et al., 2021) and the usage of antibiotics was very high in no apparent bacterial infection (Rawson et al., 2020). The neutrophil count and PCT level were used to distinguish the possibility of bacterial coinfection of COVID-19. The results showed that bacterial coinfection significantly raised the in-hospital mortality of COVID-19 patients (Zong et al.).

In another study, investigators established a link between COVID-19 respiratory illness and oropharyngeal microbiome severity. Authors have found that metabolic pathways associated with bacterial products may influence disease course positively (Bradley et al.). They are analyzing microbial abundance and the metabolic profiling of patients enhanced microbiome profiling's predictive potential for clinical outcomes. This underscores the oropharyngeal microbiome's potential diagnostic and therapeutic applications in combating respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

The persistence of SARS-CoV-2 and Pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) RNA in raw sewage from university dorms was investigated using real-time quantitative PCR (Li et al.). Results showed that the SARS-CoV-2 RNA decayed faster at 20°C than at 4°C and was detectable for at least 29 days, indicating evidence for the persistence of viral RNA in site-specific raw sewage water. This is particularly important for laboratories with limited resources and throughput, and sample storage is unavoidable. The study indicates an urgent need for attention to the examination of the decay of SARS-CoV-2 RNA at higher concentration levels and higher temperatures for a longer time.

The vigilant monitoring of common diseases with pandemic potentials, such as influenza and coronaviruses, is highly encouraged. Adaptation of the One Health-based control strategies would be among the critical measures to mitigate the risk of any potential future pandemics (Hemida and Alnaeem, 2019).

Author contributions

MH: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. DE: Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. YM: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the authors and colleagues who participated in the review process of these articles in this Research Topic.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

References

Garcia-Vidal, C., Sanjuan, G., Moreno-García, E., Puerta-Alcalde, P., Garcia-Pouton, N., Chumbita, M., et al. (2021). Incidence of co-infections and superinfections in hospitalized patients with COVID-19: a retrospective cohort study. Clin. Microbiol. Infect. 27, 83–88. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2020.07.041

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Hemida, M. G. (2019). Middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus and the One Health concept. PeerJ 7, e7556. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7556

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Hemida, M. G., and Alnaeem, A. (2019). Some One Health based control strategies for the middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus. One Health 8, 100102. doi: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2019.100102

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Hemida, M. G., and Ba Abduallah, M. M. (2020). The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak from a one health perspective. One Health 10, 100127. doi: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2020.100127

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Rawson, T. M., Moore, L. S. P., Zhu, N., Ranganathan, N., Skolimowska, K., Gilchrist, M., et al. (2020). Bacterial and fungal coinfection in individuals with coronavirus: a rapid review to support COVID-19 antimicrobial prescribing. Clin. Infect. Dis. 71, 2459–2468. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciaa530

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Keywords: One Health, coronaviruses, pandemic, emerging diseases, risk mitigation

Citation: Hemida MG, Egamberdieva D and Malik YS (2023) Editorial: Coronaviruses from the One Health perspective. Front. Microbiol. 14:1338529. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1338529

Received: 14 November 2023; Accepted: 22 November 2023;
Published: 01 December 2023.

Edited and reviewed by: Axel Cloeckaert, Institut National de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement (INRAE), France

Copyright © 2023 Hemida, Egamberdieva and Malik. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Maged Gomaa Hemida, maged.hemida@liu.edu

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.