The government are allowing us to visit the beach but are advising us to stay out of the water as there are no lifeguards on duty and do not want additional casualties in hospital. But there might be another reason for us to consider staying out too! Viruses!!! Really!!? Can you actually find viruses in the sea? It’s a simple question but not one many of us have considered before… including me, but then why would we?
 
You might think that seawater is too salty for viruses and that they would never survive in such a hostile environment. Alternatively you might think that if viruses can survive on surfaces like plastic, metal and cardboard then why not also in the sea. But do we know?
 
Well back in 1990 Scientists confirmed that viruses can indeed be found in seawater; while looking at seawater with transmission electron microscopes (TEM) they saw “something unusual” but they didn’t actually know at that time what it was… however they could see them! So they started to study them. Remember, TEMs can “see” much smaller objects than normal light microscopes; the limit of magnification of a light microscope is about 1,000x, not enough to see a virus, whereas TEMs can magnify 10,000,000x! OK I know you youngsters think 1990 seems a long time ago but in scientific terms it’s not that long, it’s only since these discoveries in the 1990s that they actually confirmed viruses were there, even though “infection” from contaminated seawater was suspected.
 
Further studies have shown that in fact there are lots and lots and lots of viruses in seawater….

As the saying goes, “there ain’t no flies on us, there ain’t no flies on us, there may be flies on some of you guys but there ain’t no flies on us!”
 
I had a great question last week from Michael Kamdar who asked me “if a healthcare professional who works within a hospital would have the flora of that of a normal person within the community or within a hospital?” Great question! And although I have no specific resources I can comment from experience… Firstly let’s go over the normal flora of non-hospitalised people.

SARS Coronavirus 2 (SARS Cov2), the cause of the infection Covid-19, is a zoonotic infection; it has been transmitted from an animal to a human. Genetic analysis of the virus has shown that SARS Cov2 is an intestinal bat coronavirus that has successfully made the jump from bats to humans, probably as a result of human contact with bat guano.
 
Although that sounds alarming, zoonotic infections are actually quite common and have been a problem for Homo sapiens/humans ever since we crawled out of the primordial slime millions of years ago.