Handle with care: Chinese study finds aquatic virus can infect human eyes

A virus found in shrimp and fish may cause an eye disease in humans, according to a recent study that marks the first known case of a pathogen from aquatic animals infecting people.

Those “who handle dissected aquatic animals daily without adequate protection or eat raw aquatic animals daily are at high risk” of being exposed to the virus, the researchers cautioned in their recently published paper.

They advised taking protective measures, such as wearing gloves, when handling such animals at home.

“To date, no virus originating from aquatic animals has been shown to infect humans and directly cause disease,” they wrote, adding that they found “this emerging human eye disease is associated with cross-species infection by an aquatic virus”.

The researchers from the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Qingdao Eye Hospital of Shandong First Medical University, the University of Melbourne and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore published their findings in Nature Microbiology in late March.

  

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