The U.S. Department of Agriculture is developing new tests and tools to identify and track the virus that causes COVID-19 in wild and domestic animals.
USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is working with $300 million from the American Rescue Plan Act to monitor animals likely susceptible to the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a Dec. 21 USDA news release.
"This investment ensures we are taking the steps necessary to safeguard our nation's animal health — and further, public health," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in the release. "Scientific research undergirds USDA's programs and policies. The new tools and data generated from this research will provide the insights necessary to accelerate our understanding of the COVID virus and help us build a more resilient national capacity to address future disease threats."
As part of the initiative, APHIS is partnering with the Agricultural Research Service in five research projects to improve understanding of the virus. The effort also will help USDA accomplish its goal "of building an early warning system to potentially prevent or limit the next zoonotic disease outbreak or global pandemic," the news release said.
Projects in the initiative aim to develop easy-to-use field tests that would quickly identify COVID-19 in wildlife, as well as in domestic animals, while field and laboratory studies hope to determine how long the virus persists in animals such as deer, the release reported. USDA scientists also are looking into whether deer or elk can be intermediate animal hosts for the COVID-19 virus to survive in the wild, which it could potentially mutate into new variants.
Another project is trying to develop a cell line model to allow researchers to better predict which animal species might be hosts or reservoirs for the COVID-19 virus, according to the release.
