COVID-19 first appeared in Chinese miners in 2012: scientists

News

By Isabel Vincent

August 15, 2020 | 2:39 p.m.

See the gallery

The coronavirus may not have originated in a wet market in Wuhan last year, but 1,000 miles away in 2012 – at the bottom of a Chinese mine shaft where workers fell with a mysterious disease of type pneumonia after being exposed to bats.

Virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson, both from the non-profit Bioscience Resource Project in Ithaca, arrived at their discovery after translating a 66-page master’s thesis from the Chinese doctor who treated the miners and sent their tissue samples in Wuhan. Institute of Virology for Testing.

“The evidence it contains has caused us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Latham and Wilson wrote in a July 15 article on their website, “Independent Science News “.

Latham told the Post that the coronavirus “almost certainly escaped” from the Wuhan lab.

In April 2012, six miners at the Mojiang mine in southwest China’s Yunnan province fell ill after spending more than 14 days disposing of bat droppings. Three ultimately died.

In his thesis, doctor Li Xu, who treated the minors, describes how patients had a high fever, dry cough, pain in the limbs and, in some cases, headaches – all symptoms now associated with COVID. -19, said Latham and Wilson. .

The way minors were treated – for example, with ventilation and a variety of medications, including steroids, blood thinners, and antibiotics – also resembles the way COVID-19 patients are treated around the world, they declared.

After performing multiple tests for hepatitis, dengue, and even HIV, the doctor saw various specialists across China, including virologist Zhong Nanshan, an international hero who handled the 2003 SARS epidemic and is considered as the country’s greatest scientist.

“The remote meeting with Zhong Nanshan is important,” Latham and Wilson said. “This implies that the illnesses of the six miners were of great concern and, second, that a SARS-like coronavirus was considered a probable cause.”

The doctor also sent tissue samples from the miners to the Wuhan lab, a focal point for coronavirus research in China. There, scientists discovered that the source of the infection was a SARS-like coronavirus from a Chinese red horseshoe, according to the thesis.

Latham and Wilson believe the virus – once inside the miners – “evolved” into SARS CoV-2, “an exceptionally pathogenic coronavirus highly adapted to humans,” and the samples somehow escaped the lab. last year, launching what has turned into the coronavirus pandemic.

Scientists in New York called their original COVID-19 hypothesis a “passage of the miners of Mojiang”; “Passage” is a virological term for adapting viruses to new species, they said.

Although scientists at the Wuhan lab collected coronavirus samples from bats at the same mine, they missed the 2012 connection, Latham told the Post.

In fact, Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan lab known as “batwoman” for her extensive research on coronaviruses derived from bats, told Scientific American in June that the miners had died from a fungal infection, “Although it was only a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been quickly closed,” the magazine reported.

“The mine shaft stank like hell,” Shi told the magazine. “Bat guano, covered in mushrooms, littered the cave.”

See the gallery

The reaction to Latham-Wilson’s discovery gradually attracted positive reviews from the American scientific community. Renowned American geneticist and molecular engineer George Church shared his work on Twitter in July. The tweet garnered 304 retweets and 403 likes. Stuart Newman, a leading expert in cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Westchester called it “the best explanation to date for the origins of # SARSCoV2” in a July 19 tweet on the report.

“We believe it is circulating underground in the scientific community,” Latham said. “People think it has merit, but they are reluctant to make it public because the coronavirus has become very politicized.”

Chinese officials say the coronavirus, which has infected more than 19 million people worldwide and killed nearly 800,000, originated in Wuhan in December, when it broke through the barrier of animal species for sale in the market seafood from Huanan.

But many scientists are still questioning the origins of the infection, especially after the market was cleaned up and closed by government officials almost as soon as the pandemic began to spread.