Following an investigation that lasted one month, the World Health Organization (WHO) has discovered that wildlife farms in China are possibly the sources of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Disease ecologist Peter Daszak from the WHO team that traveled to China said in an NPR report that wildlife farms, a lot of them in or around the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, were possibly supplying animals to vendors of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, the site where early COVID-19 cases were detected last year.
Some of these wild animals, the said report specified, could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 from bats in the said site. The global organization is expected to come out with a release on its findings in the coming weeks.
Early this year, a team of experts from WHO went to China to investigate how the fatal pandemic, which, as of this writing, has infected 121,772,653 people and claimed the lives of over 2.6 million globally.
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A general view of the closed Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which has been linked to cases of COVID-19, on January 17, 2020, in Wuhan, China.
Origin of the Virus
Since the pandemic started, there has been a rash of conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus and how it spread out, including theories that it escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. But in February, the WHO investigators dismissed such a theory.
The common agreement among scientists was that COVID-19 circulated in bats and jumped to humans possibly through an intermediate species.
This is exactly what the WHO investigations discovered: The virus possibly passed from bats in southern China to wildlife farm animals, then, to humans.
According to Daszak, the wildlife farms are part of a project that the government of China has been promoting for two decades now to lift rural populations out of poverty and put a closure to the rural-urban gap.
The WHO expert added that people are have kept exotic animals like civets, porcupines, pangolins, bamboo rats, and raccoon dogs to breed them in captivity.
Farms Breeding Animals Carrying Coronaviruses
In February last year, China closed the said farms, possibly because the Chinese government thought they were part of the transmission pathway between bats and humans, explained Daszak.
The government issued instructions to farmers about how to burn, kill or bury the animals in a manner that would not spread disease.
A lot of these farms breed animals that carry coronaviruses. These include cats, civets and pangolins. Most of these animals are found in or close to the Yunnan province in southern China where scientists previously detected a bat virus that was 96-percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
According to this said report, the WHO still does not know what specific animal transmitted the virus from bats to humans.
Daszak said, he does think that SARS-CoV-2 initially got into humans in South China. Furthermore, the WHO discovered evidence too, that, as mentioned earlier, these wildlife farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
China is closing the pathway down for a purpose, said Daszak. Specifically, they probably thought that this was the most possible pathway of transmission. This is also the conclusion of the health agency.
Related information on the origin of COVID-19 is shown on NDTV's YouTube video below:
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