Saturday, December 2, 2023
Village Voice News
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Home
  • News
  • Sports
  • Editorial
  • Letters
  • Global
  • Columns
    • Eye On Guyana
    • Hindsight
    • Lincoln Lewis Speaks
    • Future Notes
    • Blackout
    • From The Desk of Roysdale Forde SC
    • Diplomatic Speak
    • Mark’s Take
    • In the village
    • Mind Your Business
    • Bad & Bold
    • The Voice of Labour
    • The Herbal Section
    • Politics 101 with Dr. David Hinds
    • Talking Dollars & Making Sense
    • Book Review 
  • Education & Technology
  • E-Paper
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
  • Sports
  • Editorial
  • Letters
  • Global
  • Columns
    • Eye On Guyana
    • Hindsight
    • Lincoln Lewis Speaks
    • Future Notes
    • Blackout
    • From The Desk of Roysdale Forde SC
    • Diplomatic Speak
    • Mark’s Take
    • In the village
    • Mind Your Business
    • Bad & Bold
    • The Voice of Labour
    • The Herbal Section
    • Politics 101 with Dr. David Hinds
    • Talking Dollars & Making Sense
    • Book Review 
  • Education & Technology
  • E-Paper
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Village Voice News
No Result
View All Result
Home News

Neanderthal gene probably caused up to a million Covid deaths

Admin by Admin
November 5, 2022
in News
0
SHARES
0
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

READ ALSO

Dr Simpson outlines Guyana’s Path to Sustainable Development and Global Goals by 2030

Venezuela’s planned vote over territory controversy leaves Guyana residents on edge

Support Village Voice News With a Donation of Your Choice.

By Joe Pinkstone- A single Neanderthal gene found in one in six Britons is likely to blame for up to a million Covid deaths, according to an Oxford academic.
The LZTFL1 gene is a Neanderthal gene found on chromosome three and has been previously shown to double a person’s risk of severe disease and death.
But before now there had never been an estimated figure for how many lives were lost to this single piece of genetic code.
Roughly 15 per cent of Europeans have the Neanderthal form of the gene, compared to about 60 per cent of South Asians.
Dr James Davies of the University of Oxford, a genomic expert and ICU doctor who worked on the Covid wards during the pandemic, discovered the innocuous gene’s lethal role last year after creating a brand new cutting-edge way of looking at DNA in exceptional detail.
The method allowed him to identify LZTFL1 as the culpable gene increasing mortality, whereas previous methods had failed to narrow it down beyond 28 different genes.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Dr Davies said: “We used the technique and it identified a virtually understudied gene called LZTFL1 and at the time that this had not been linked to infection at all.
“It’s a single letter difference out of three billion. This tiny section of DNA doubles your risk of dying from Covid.
“It’s position 45,818,159 on chromosome three, and it’s a single change. If you’ve got a G at that site, it’s low risk. And if you have an A at that site it is high risk.”
His team believe that the Neanderthal gene changes how a cell behaves when the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptor on a human cell.
In most people, this leads to the cell then changing shape and becoming less specialised and less prone to infection, stymying the progression of the infection.
“What this high risk variant does is it creates a new signal that tells that gene to stay on for slightly too long in response to infection,” Prof Davies said.
“And so they stay in this state where they’re highly specialised, and they’re prone to infection for longer.”
The number of deaths globally from this nefarious genetic variant “is in the hundreds of thousands to a million,” he told the audience.
‘Dinner date’ between human and Neanderthal
Dr Davies and his colleague from Oxford Brookes University, Dr Simon Underdown, a biological anthropologist, also revealed that the Neanderthal gene first infiltrated humans 60,000 years ago after one romantic liaison and interspecies tryst between a human and a neanderthal. A solitary coupling event across species lines saw the deadly Covid gene jump from our now-extinct cousin species into us.
“If this dinner date between the human and the Neanderthal had gone wrong, we would have had a much better time in Covid, we would have had hundreds of thousands less deaths,” said Prof Davies.
“The reason that we know that is that it’s inherited as this block with 28 single letter changes, and you can track that all the way back and it has to be a single event. It’s just so unlikely that you get all 28 changes at the same time and in the same block.”
Neanderthals ‘looked just like us’
Dr Underdown added that Neanderthals would likely have looked very similar to humans.
“Arguably, they look just like us,” he said. “If you dress one of these guys up in a hat and a coat…you wouldn’t give them a second glance.
“What would happen when a Neanderthal came into contact with Homo sapiens? Would they even recognise them as different? I would argue very much that they wouldn’t.”
“They would have thought they were unusual insofar as they didn’t look exactly alike but they were similar enough that they probably wouldn’t have even known it was something that different.
“We see Neanderthal integration, or sex, taking place around 60,000 years ago after they left Africa and this is the event where James’s gene jumps across.
“This is the event where the gene that gives you more severe Covid jumps across into the Homo sapien lineage.” (The Telegraph)



Support Village Voice News With a Donation of Your Choice



ShareTweetSendShareSend

Related Posts

Dr. Simpson DaSilva
News

Dr Simpson outlines Guyana’s Path to Sustainable Development and Global Goals by 2030

by Admin
December 2, 2023

By Michelle Ann Joseph- In a digitally connected world with widespread access to the internet, one might wonder if there...

Read more
Tranquil and slow-paced life in the expansive savannas and rainforests that is home to Guyana’s native Amerindian peoples, have been disturbed recently by rumors of violence – and even war. The territory larger than Greece, known as “The Essequibo,” that stands between Guyana and Venezuela, is claimed by both countries as their own. (AP Video: Juan Arraez) (Nov 29)
News

Venezuela’s planned vote over territory controversy leaves Guyana residents on edge

by Admin
December 1, 2023

Surama (Guyana)-Congregants of an Anglican church in a sparsely populated rainforest village in Guyana gathered recently to bid on a...

Read more
INews Photo
News

Emancipation and its Contemporary Challenges

by Admin
December 1, 2023

The question is, are we truly emancipated? While Emancipation Day is celebrated annually to commemorate the end of the Atlantic...

Read more
Next Post
Former President Barrack Obama, left, finishes his remarks and welcomes Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, to the stage during a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Saturday, Nov. 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Obama to Democrats: ‘Sulking and moping is not an option’

EDITOR'S PICK

Camel pageant among attractions on World Cup sidelines

December 2, 2022
Pritipaul Singh Investment Armed Security prevents DCEL's employees from carrying out works on the streets

DCEL demands that Pritipaul Singh Investments vacate Providence land

May 12, 2021

The discrimination against Black people and man’s cruelty

November 4, 2023

Unions conclude pact with DDL for bigger pay for workers

August 7, 2020

© 2022 Village Voice | Developed by Ink Creative Agency

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
  • Sports
  • Editorial
  • Letters
  • Global
  • Columns
    • Eye On Guyana
    • Hindsight
    • Lincoln Lewis Speaks
    • Future Notes
    • Blackout
    • From The Desk of Roysdale Forde SC
    • Diplomatic Speak
    • Mark’s Take
    • In the village
    • Mind Your Business
    • Bad & Bold
    • The Voice of Labour
    • The Herbal Section
    • Politics 101 with Dr. David Hinds
    • Talking Dollars & Making Sense
    • Book Review 
  • Education & Technology
  • E-Paper
  • Contact Us

© 2022 Village Voice | Developed by Ink Creative Agency