Origin of the pandemic: Scientists find evidence of illegal sale of animals in Chinese markets

There were already more than 173 million people affected by coronavirus infection, and moree 3.7 million deaths worldwide. But the conclusive answer on how it all started is still pending for the scientific community. Now, a team of scientists from China, Canada and United Kingdom presented evidence that in the wholesale seafood market of Huanan and other markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan, wild animals were being sold illegally before the start of the pandemic.

The researchers’ work has been published in the journal Scientific reports, and shows that in the Wuhan markets wild animals have been sold, including species protected by Chinese law. “Almost all the animals were sold alive, caged”, they were “crowded” and in “bad condition”, detailed the study. Many animals had gunshot wounds or trap marks.

“In most of the stalls, they offered to slaughter and butcher the purchase with the implications for animal hygiene and welfare, ”wrote scientists Zhao-Min Zhou and Xiao Xiao., Hubei University of Chinese Medicine – among others, David Macdonald, England, and Christina Buesching, Canada.

Although the study does not show that the illegal sale of animals was a factor that directly influenced the emergence of the coronavirus in humans, it provides more clues to understand the origin of the problem which has become global. One hypothesis is that the virus could have passed from animals to humans on market stalls in Wuhan. Another hypothesis is that a natural leak of the virus would have occurred from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Since the start of the pandemic, the first focus of attention has been on the city of Wuhan. According to the World Health Organization, of the first 168 cases of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in December 2019 in Wuhan, 47 had visited the Huanan seafood market. In addition, 38 other infected people had visited other food markets in the city.

This week, the World Health Organization (WHO) asked the Milan Tumor Institute to perform a new test in an independent laboratory on a previous report published in November 2020 which indicated the possibility that the SARS -CoV-2 virus was already circulating among the Italian population in October 2019, the medical center informed EFE.

Huanan Market occupies an area of ​​50,000 square meters and had more than 1,000 operating stalls. On January 1, 2020, the market was closed after Chinese health authorities reported that there were people who contracted the new disease in December 2019 and were there.

Shortly before the first cases were diagnosed in December 2019, the team of scientists Zhao-Min Zhou and Xiao Xiao were conducting interviews with vendors from 17 markets in Wuhan. They had started research in 2017, as part of a project that attempted to stop the spread of another highly deadly and potentially pandemic virus, better known by its acronym in English: SFTS. It means severe fever with thrombocytopenic syndrome.

The virus that scientists were studying is transmitted by tick bites and can pass from animals to humans. In 2020, there was an outbreak of the SFTS virus in eastern China that infected 60 people and killed seven more. During interviews on the markets, scientists found that none of the positions analyzed clearly clarified the origin of the meat or animals sold there. “Almost all sales of wild animals were illegal“, add the researchers.

Also in Wuhan markets, starlings popular for mimicking the human voice were sold for around $ 365, poisonous snakes $ 85 per kilo and raccoon dogs $ 30 per kilo. These dogs are among the mammals that can be infected with and transmit the coronavirus. Some species are also reservoirs for other dangerous diseases such as rabies and H5N1 avian influenza.

One fact that caught the eye is that among the animals that were for sale there were no bats or pangolins, which have been seen as potential reservoirs for the coronavirus to affect humans.

The illegal sale of wild animals was recorded in Wuhan markets until scientists carried out their last inspection in November 2019. The work in Scientific reports it did not analyze which pathogens were present in wild animals and which species were sold.

The new data published, which was not available to the Chinese health authority, calls into question the work of the team of experts that the World Health Organization sent to this Asian country last January to investigate the origin of the pandemic.

In their report, the mission’s experts said that officials at Huanan market assured them that “All the animals for sale were from legal farms” and that there were no living wild animals. However, the same work warned that of the nearly 1,000 samples taken between January and March 2020 from the various market stalls in Huanan and others like it, 73 had the coronavirus.

For Ian Lipkin, researcher in emerging viruses at Columbia University, in the United States and scientific advisor to the film Contagion, which showed a scenario similar to that of the coronavirus pandemic, the work which shows that there has been illegal sale of wild animals “It is a very important study.”

He added: “It provides an explanation for the Wuhan outbreak that is at least as plausible as a lab breakout. He also underlines the importance of closing the markets which sell live wild animals and which they do not reopen ”.

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