A coronavirus variant once helped the global pork industry. Could one protect us?

A coronavirus that began killing large numbers of piglets decades ago has since mutated into a variant that protects against the original without causing severe disease itself. Long before COVID-19 became a household word—in 1946 , to be precise—veterinary researchers at Purdue University reported that something invading the guts of young pigs was causing diarrhea, vomiting, and weight loss, ultimately killing most of them. The scientists did not know the cause of the sickness, which devastated U.S. pig farms, but they could trigger the disease by feeding ground-up bits of a sick pig’s guts to healthy piglets. This pig […]

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