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The World Health Organization Will Send a Scientific Team to China to Investigate Covid's Origins.
The news item I'll discuss in this brief post is from Nature, one of the world's premier scientific journals, this one: Scientists call for pandemic investigations to focus on wildlife trade
Subtitle: The World Health Organization is sending scientists to China this weekend to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak.
(Smriti Malapati, Nature News, July 10, 2020).
The news article is open sourced.
Some brief excerpts:
China’s wildlife trade should be thoroughly investigated as part of efforts to uncover the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, say researchers. The call comes as the World Health Organization (WHO) is sending scientists to China this weekend, ahead of plans for a larger international research team to probe the pandemic’s origin...
...Researchers say the focus should be on activities linked to China’s wildlife trade — both legal and illegal — including hunting areas, storage facilities, farms and markets. “All parts of the wildlife supply chain need to be investigated,” says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi. “We need to test any wild or farmed wild animal species that could potentially be in close and frequent contact with humans in China,” she says.
Most researchers agree that the SARS-CoV-2 virus probably originated in horseshoe bats, but the route it took to get to humans remains a mystery. The virus could have jumped directly from bats to people and evolved over time into the current pandemic strain, or it could have passed through intermediate animals...
...Early in the pandemic, pangolins were thought to be a possible intermediate host of the SARS-CoV-2 virus when researchers detected related coronaviruses in animals that had been seized in southern China between 2017 and 2019. Pangolins are found across southeast Asia and are among the most trafficked animals in the world for their scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine. The coronaviruses found in the pangolins were too different to be SARS-CoV-2’s direct ancestor, but researchers say that when and how the animals got infected could provide clues about where SARS-CoV-2 originated...
...The evidence suggests that the pangolins seized in China were exposed to coronaviruses while being transported to their final destination, rather than in the wild, says Jimmy Lee, a researcher with the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and the paper’s first author. “Pangolins are most likely incidental hosts infected within the wildlife trade,” says Lee, but more research is needed to rule them out as an intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2.
The pangolins could have been infected by other traded animals or the people that smuggled them, says Yujia Alina Chan, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In raids, smuggled pangolins have been found with masked palm civets, an intermediate host of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, and with bat carcasses...
...Researchers say the focus should be on activities linked to China’s wildlife trade — both legal and illegal — including hunting areas, storage facilities, farms and markets. “All parts of the wildlife supply chain need to be investigated,” says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi. “We need to test any wild or farmed wild animal species that could potentially be in close and frequent contact with humans in China,” she says.
Most researchers agree that the SARS-CoV-2 virus probably originated in horseshoe bats, but the route it took to get to humans remains a mystery. The virus could have jumped directly from bats to people and evolved over time into the current pandemic strain, or it could have passed through intermediate animals...
...Early in the pandemic, pangolins were thought to be a possible intermediate host of the SARS-CoV-2 virus when researchers detected related coronaviruses in animals that had been seized in southern China between 2017 and 2019. Pangolins are found across southeast Asia and are among the most trafficked animals in the world for their scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine. The coronaviruses found in the pangolins were too different to be SARS-CoV-2’s direct ancestor, but researchers say that when and how the animals got infected could provide clues about where SARS-CoV-2 originated...
...The evidence suggests that the pangolins seized in China were exposed to coronaviruses while being transported to their final destination, rather than in the wild, says Jimmy Lee, a researcher with the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and the paper’s first author. “Pangolins are most likely incidental hosts infected within the wildlife trade,” says Lee, but more research is needed to rule them out as an intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2.
The pangolins could have been infected by other traded animals or the people that smuggled them, says Yujia Alina Chan, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In raids, smuggled pangolins have been found with masked palm civets, an intermediate host of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, and with bat carcasses...
American scientists will not be included in the study, because America's scientific infrastructure has been destroyed by an illiterate ignoramus who had someone else take his SATs because he can't read, he can't think, and he's way to stupid even to grasp how stupid he is.
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