Ejercicio Grupo B - 3 · Inglés PAU Canarias Julio 2022

From hippos to hamsters: how Covid is affecting creatures great and small

A year ago humanity embarked on a project to vaccinate every person against Covid-19. But in recent months

a shadow vaccination campaign has also been taking place. From giraffes to snow leopards, gorillas to sea

lions, zoos around the world have been inoculating their animals with an experimental Covid vaccine to

prevent what they fear could be a similarly fatal illness for certain mammals.

5 Meanwhile, veterinary scientists have been struggling to understand the scale of Covid-19 infection in our

furry household companions, and what the consequences could be for their health – and our own.

Last week two hippos at Antwerp zoo in Belgium became the latest in a group of creatures to contract Covid

from humans. Fortunately, Imani and Hermien had no symptoms apart from runny noses, but other animals

haven’t been so fortunate. In November three snow leopards died from Covid-related complications at a

10 children’s zoo in Nebraska. Other zoos have reported infections in gorillas, lions, tigers and cougars.

Although Sars-CoV-2 is generally thought to have originated in an animal, most likely a bat, until recently

most of the scientific focus has, understandably, been on how the disease affects humans. However, since

the early days of the pandemic, scientists have worried about the possibility of other animal infections.

“We’ve always recognised that coronaviruses have this tremendous capacity to jump species. So it was

15 always predicted that there would be a variety of domestic animals, livestock and possibly wildlife that could

be infected,” said Margaret Hosie, a professor of comparative virology at the University of Glasgow’s Centre

for Virus Research.

If other animals can become infected and transmit the virus, this could put pressure on it to adapt and acquire

new mutations, raising the prospect of new variants that could be transmitted back to people.

20 “The current pandemic is maintained by human to human transmission, but we need to keep a close watch

on animals,” said Alan Radford, a professor in veterinary health informatics at the University of Liverpool.

For now, the most likely source of new variants is continued circulation of the virus in humans. With ongoing

high infection rates, we still present a far greater risk to our pets than they do to us.

This is unfortunate. “When we’re sick, what is better than a cuddle with our pets?” said Rebecca Fisher, an

25 assistant professor of epidemiology at Texas A&M University. “Tough as it is, if we are sick we must try to

not interact with them, and not pass anything on to them. We need to try our hardest to protect them, just as

we would our human children.”

Fragment adapted from The Guardian, December 2021

3. Find a word or expression in the text that means... (1 point)

a)

b)

c)

d)