According to a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of COVID-19 in China, the Wild animal farms found in southern countries are the most likely source of the pandemic.
At the end of January, WHO researchers were dispatched to Wuhan, China, to identify the origins of COVID-19. After a dozen days of work in the field, the team - made up of ten international scientists and five WHO experts - gave us their first conclusions, ruling out the hypothesis of the virus leaking from a P4 laboratory. of the city, deemed "extremely unlikely" by the researchers.
On the other hand, the results of this investigation supported the idea of a virus transmitted to humans via an intermediate animal host. Itself, of course, would therefore have been initially infected by a "reservoir species" (probably horseshoe bats).
So what is this intermediary? We don't know yet, but we might know the "starting point" of this incredible pandemic.
According to Peter Daszak, disease ecologist at the EcoHealth Alliance and member of the WHO delegation that visited China this year, farms wild animals of the country would be incriminated.
Questioned by the NPR site, the researcher points out that these wild animal farms, many of which are in or around Yunnan province in southern China, provided animals to vendors at the Huanan Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in late 2019.
Some of these wild animals, he says, may have been infected by bats in the area.
Wildlife farms are part of a project that the Chinese government has been promoting for twenty years to support rural populations. “ They take exotic animals, such as civet cats, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and breed them in captivity ” to then sell them on the markets, explains the researcher to NPR.
In February 2020, China also reportedly shut down these farms, likely because the Chinese government thought they might have some connection to the pandemic. The authorities would have sent instructions to farmers in the region on how to get rid of the animals, so as to cut off these possible transmission routes, underlines the researcher.
The next step, says Daszak, will be to determine precisely which species carried the virus among these many wild animal farms. The WHO is expected to publish a new report in the coming weeks.
