After a month-long investigation, the World Health Organization (WHO) has found that game farms in China are likely to be the source of the COVID-19. pandemic.
These game farms, many of which are in or around the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, probably supplied animals to traders at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where early cases of COVID-19 were discovered last year, said Peter Daszak, an ecologist from the WHO team that traveled to China, told NPR. Some of these wild animals could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 from bats in the area.
The WTO is expected to release its findings in a report in the coming weeks.
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In January, a WTO team of experts traveled to China to investigate how the deadly pandemic, which now infected more than 120 million people and killed 2.6 million people worldwide, began, Live Science reported earlier. A result of conspiracy theories has been spread about the origin of the virus, including that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. Last month, WTO investigators rejected that explanation.
The general consensus among scientists was that the coronavirus circulated in bats and jumped on humans, probably through an intermediary. This is exactly what the WHO investigations found: The virus probably transmitted from bats in southern China to animals in game farms, and then to humans.
The game farms are part of a project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years to lift rural populations out of poverty and close the gap between rural and urban, according to Daszak and NPR.
“They take exotic animals, such as rivets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” Daszak told NPR.
But in February 2020, China closed those farms, probably because the Chinese government thought they were part of the bat-to-humans transmission route, Daszak said. The government sent out instructions to farmers on how to bury, kill or burn the animals in a way that would not spread disease, Daszak told NPR.
Many of these farms breed animals that can carry coronaviruses, including rivets, cats and pangolins. Most are located in or near Yunnan Province in southern China, where scientists have previously discovered a bat virus. 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2, according to NPR. The WHO still does not know which animal transmitted the virus from bats to humans.
“I do think that SARS-CoV-2 first came across people in southern China. It looks like that,” Daszak told NPR. The WHO also found evidence that these game farms supplied the Huanan Seafood Wholesale market.
“China is shutting down the road for a reason,” Daszak said. Namely, it said that they probably thought this was the most likely way of transmission, and that is also what the WTO report will conclude, he added.
You can read the whole story on NPR.
Originally published on Live Science.