Filenews 18 March 2021
The pandemic coronavirus is more likely to have come from wildlife farms that fed Wuhan's fish market, a member of the World Health Organization mission in China said, just weeks before the agency announced the official finding.
China rushed to close the farms in February 2020, an indication that it knew it was a possible source of SARS-CoV-2, Peter Dazsak, an ecologist with the EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO expert group, told US NPR.
Suspicions are turning to farms in southern China's Yunnan Province, about 1,000 kilometres from Wuhan, where the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a bat crown with a genetic resemblance of up to 96%, was found in 2013.
Another four related coronaviruses were identified this week in Yunnan province, one of whom shares 96% of its genetic material with the pandemic coronavirus.
Wildlife farms are part of an unusual project promoted by the Chinese government for 20 years.
"China has promoted wildlife farming as a means to alleviate poverty among the province's populations," Dazsak said.
"They take exotic animals, such as muskrats, thorns, pangolos, nocturnal animals, bamboo rats and raise them in captivity," he said.
The breeding program "was very successful. In 2016, wildlife farms employed 14 million people in a $70 billion industry.
Everything suddenly changed at the beginning of the pandemic. On February 24, 2020, Beijing changed its policy. "They issued a declaration saying they would stop raising wild animals as food," Dazsak said.
The explanation he gives himself to the sudden turnaround is that Beijing suspected farms as a source of evil. The farms were instructed to kill and bury all farmed animals.
Some of the farmed animals, such as muskrats and pangolins, are known to be affected by coronaviruses.
During the WHO mission in Wuhan city, where the first cases of Covid-19 were recorded in late 2019, the agency's experts found evidence that South China Sea farms, including Yunnan Province, supplied animals to Wuhan's central market, which is associated with the first known cases.
Dazsak believes, however, that the coronavirus first switched to humans not in Wuhan but in southern China. "That's what the situation looks like," he said.
A second member of the WHO mission in China also spoke to NPR. Linfa Wang, a virusologist who studies bat viruses at Dukle-NUS Medical School in Singapore, agreed with his colleague that China that farms were an ideal corridor through which a bat virus could reach Wuhan.
"China closed this route for a reason," he said. "In February 2020, they thought this was the most likely route."
"And when the WHO report is made public [...] we also believe that this was the most likely route."
The next step, Dazsak said, is to identify the species that acted as an intermediate host for the transfer of the virus from bats to humans.
The WHO's finding on the origin of the pandemic is expected in two weeks.
Source: news.in.gr
