Truth about newly discovered virus deadlier than coronavirus

While the world is search for a cure for the deadly coronavirus which has claimed about 2000 person’s life, scientists have found another virus.

Unlike Coronavirus which started in China, this new one comes from an artificial lake in Brazil.

Reports said that this virus tagged “Yaravirus” was found in an amoeba.

Scientists has found a mysterious unusual virus in a lake in Brazil.

Reporting the new discovery in bioRxiv, a biological sciences website, the researchers wrote: “We report the discovery of Yaravirus, a new lineage of amoebal virus with a puzzling origin and phylogeny.”

According to senior author and a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, Jônatas Abrahão “It was really a big surprise since so far we only know giant viruses infecting amoebas, not small viruses.”

He revealed that they searched for the Yaravirus’ gene signature in thousands of environmental genomic data and found nothing, “indicating how rare this virus is.”

While they are still researching the virus, they have found out that it infects amoebas like giant viruses do.

“This is one of the reasons why this new virus is so intriguing and we claim that it challenges the classification of DNA viruses,” Abrahão said.

In order to find out the cause, he said, “It would be necessary to isolate new viruses similar to Yaravirus to improve our analysis and try to define their origin.”

Considering the fact that this new discovery comes so soon after the coronavirus was discovered, it is important to know that the Yaravirus does not infect human cells.

“If we consider all known viruses by now, we can say that most of them do not represent any threat for our health,” Abrahão said.

“There is still a lot to explore,” Abrahão said.

“Yara” or “Iara,” is a Brazilian name given to a girl child, it has Arabic origin, means ‘mother of waters’ – a mythical siren/mermaid figure from Brazilian mythos who would lure sailors subsurface.