Kyasanur forest disease virus (red) infects lymph nodes in areas enriched for antibody-producing cells (green).
Image credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID/NIH, CC-BY 4.0
Creationist mode: 
As any Creationist will tell you, the intelligent [sic] designer is never one to sit back and rest on its laurels, admiring its handiwork. So, while the SARS-CoV-2 is wreaking havoc worldwide and killing people by the hundreds of thousands, it isn't just sitting back enjoying the spectacle. It is busy working on something else with which to cause death and suffering in the human population.
As reported today in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, Rebecca Broeckel at the National Institutes of Health in Montana, and colleagues, the malevolence who designed them has stolen a march on medical science by designing two tick-bourne haemorrhagic deseases, Kyasanur Forest disease and Alkhurma hemorrhagic disease, which are causing concern for public health officials, but for which until now, there were no suitable animal models for experimenting on.
After all, when you've put a lot of effort into designing a vector like the tick with which to infect people and other animals with the viruses and bacteria you create to make them sick, why not make full use of it, to spread a couple of new diseases, and then make it difficult for medical scientists to come up with cures?
As information provided by PLOS ahead of publication explains:
Tick-borne flaviviruses such as Kyasanur Forest disease virus (KFDV) in India, and its close relative Alkhurma hemorrhagic disease virus (AHFV) in the Arabian Peninsula, cause severe hemorrhagic fever in humans, and infection can be fatal. Their increasing prevalence and geographic spread pose a public health threat, but an absence of close animal models has hampered research and currently, vaccines against these tick-borne viruses have limited efficacy.So, the intelligent [sic] designer set out from the start to make things difficult for medical science, by designing diseases for which there were few suitable animal models to experiment on. But that might well have changed now. The team report that pigtailed macaques could be just that animal model.
Creationist mode: 
In search of an accurate primate model for clinical research, researchers inoculated eight female pigtailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) with KFDV and four with AHFV, and found that, like humans, they developed loss of appetite, dehydration, and hemorrhagic symptoms within two to four days. Infected macaques also exhibited reduced levels of blood lymphocytes and platelets, and elevated liver enzymes – hallmark symptoms of human KFDV infections. Infectious virus was found in the gastrointestinal tract, consistent with symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea and hemorrhaging often seen in human patients. RNA sequencing of the whole blood transcriptome at zero, two, and six days after inoculation revealed that KFDV infection caused downregulation of gene expression for blood clotting factors, which may explain the greater severity of this disease compared to AHFV.In the summary to their published paper the authors say:
This study is the first to characterize infection of pigtailed macaques with KFDV or AHFV. The authors say that the similarity of pigtailed macaques’ symptoms to humans and their availability in clinical research make the species a strong candidate for future vaccine and antiviral research on these diseases of public health concern.
Author summarySo, the arms race between medical science and Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer is on. Because it designed them to be so similar to humans and look like they could be closely related and sharing a common ancestor, humans are now able to use pigtailed macaques to test new vaccines and treatments for the two nasty little viruses the designer had been developing in India and Arabia. It'll be interesting to see what its next move will be and how it will disguise it to look just like a product of evolution, the way it did with humans and pigtailed macaques.
Kyasanur Forest disease virus (KFDV) and Alkhurma hemorrhagic disease virus (AHFV) are tick-borne flaviviruses that cause viral hemorrhagic fevers in India and the Arabian Peninsula, respectively. Bonnet macaques and black-faced langurs are susceptible to KFDV infection, but these animals do not experience hemorrhagic signs as seen in human cases with KFDV. This work characterizes for the first time experimental infection of KFDV and AHFV in pigtailed macaques (PTMs). Infected PTMs can develop moderate to severe disease that models multiple features of human disease, including some hemorrhagic signs. Together these data describe the PTM model for KFDV and AHFV as a valuable tool for future work to study viral pathogenesis and for assessing the efficacy of vaccines and antivirals.
Broeckel RM, Feldmann F, McNally KL, Chiramel AI, Sturdevant GL, Leung JM, et al. (2021)
A pigtailed macaque model of Kyasanur Forest disease virus and Alkhurma hemorrhagic disease virus pathogenesis.
PLoS Pathog 17(12): e1009678. DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1009678
Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by PLoS
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Ticks have been tormenting animals for some 110 million years during the Cretaceous period when Dinosaurs existed. There's evidence that they preyed on Dinosaurs and Reptiles, prehistoric mammals, and prehistoric birds. They very likely pestered prehistoric hominids and prehistoric humans to sustain their perverse nourishment. They are incredibly tough and resilient. After all, the creator made them to torture and kill other life forms. That's the main function of Ticks, is to make life hell to other organisms. Boy when the creator puts his mind to inflict suffering there is just no stopping him. The creator is an evil bastard who wants his creation to suffer. Cruel, sadistic, heartless, amoral bastard who has no conscience. Ticks are one of the countless reasons why the world is a disgusting, dangerous, and scary place. The world is a hellhole and horror movie ruled by the Devil and not by a loving God.
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