Does Lumpy Skin Disease virus have the potential to become a zoonotic agent?Lauro Velazquez-Salinas* Amanda Harvey and Chad Mire*AffiliationNational Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), ARS, USDA, Manhattan, KS 66502, USA.Corresponding authors:Lauro Velazquez-Salinas: lauro.velazquez@usda.gov and Chad Mire: chad.mire@usda.govTo The Editor,The purpose of this letter is to call the attention of the scientific community to the recent manuscript published by Tomar and Khairnar, 2024 [1]. In this study, using a metagenomic analysis, the authors discovered the presence of genome fragments of lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) in nasopharyngeal swab samples (obtained from SARS-CoV-2 surveillance activities during 2023) collected from twelve human subjects located in the districts of Nagpur, Chandrapur, and Bhandara state of Maharashtra, India. These findings highlight the potential of LSDV to be a new zoonotic agent. Herein, we consider aspects of LSDV that may lend to this eventuality and suggest further steps to investigate whether a spillover event has occurred.

To date (2/5/2023), nearly three years after the official declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, a total of 754, 018, 841 cases and 6,817,478 deaths have been officially reported to the world health organization (WHO) ([https://covid19.who.int/](https://covid19.who.int/)). During this time, the global populace has witnessed the devastating effects of this pandemic, which can undoubtedly be considered the sanitary event of the century. In my opinion, understanding the mechanisms associated with the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 is the most important aspect of understanding the course of this pandemic. In this respect, the millions of viral sequences generated during the pandemic (1) have significantly aided in the tracking of the pandemic, resulting in the identification of multiple variants of concern.