A team of scientists at the University of Hong Kong has found that some patients infected with Covid-19 may experience an active and prolonged intestinal viral infection, even in the absence of gastrointestinal symptoms, reports Bloomberg.
The new coronavirus may continue to infect and replicate in the digestive tract, even after the airways are cleared, according to a statement by Chinese researchers on Monday. The study’s findings, published in the medical journal GUT, have implications for the identification and treatment of cases, according to experts.
SARS-CoV-2 spreads mainly through respiratory droplets from the mouth and nose, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). However, since the early stage of the pandemic, scientists say that the infectious virus in patients’ stools can also play an important role in transmission.
A February study of 73 patients hospitalized with the coronavirus in China’s Guangdong province found that more than half tested positive for the virus through feces.
“We used to think of SARS-CoV-2 only as a lung or respiratory disease,” said Siew Chien Ng, director of the University of Hong Kong’s Intestinal Microbiota Research Center, in an interview this Tuesday. “However, in recent months, there has been a lot of evidence that the virus also affects the intestinal tract,” he added.
Ng and his colleagues studied stool samples from 15 patients to better understand the virus’s behavior in the gastrointestinal tract, discovering an active intestinal infection in seven of them, some of whom had no nausea, diarrhea or other digestive symptoms.
The patients’ feces continued to show a positive result for the disease about a week after their respiratory samples were negative, according to Ng, who said that a patient continued to test positive 30 days later.
Ng and his colleagues plan to carry out further tests to demonstrate that virus particles in feces are capable of causing infectious diseases. However, it is not yet known how SARS-CoV-2 reaches the gastrointestinal tract to cause an infection. It is possible that some infectious particles survive the acidic environment of the stomach.
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