According to experts, new genetic evidence from a Wuhan live food market ties Covid-19 to raccoon dogs, supporting the notion that infected animals sold there triggered the coronavirus outbreak.
'More Than a Market Origin'
According to The Guardian, Covid and human DNA were previously identified in swabs taken from Huanan seafood market booths two months after the market closed on January 1, 2020. Chinese scientists reported detecting no animal DNA in the samples when they released their results last year.
An international group of scientists has since disproved such a theory. In several Covid-positive samples, they detected a high DNA concentration from raccoon dogs after analyzing gene sequences provided by the Chinese researchers on the scientific database Gisaid. Covid-positive samples also included traces of DNA from other animals, including civets.
Scientists presenting their results to an expert committee at the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday, Mar. 14, said that although the findings do not show that raccoon dogs or other animals infected with Covid sparked the pandemic, it does increase the likelihood of such a scenario.
Professor Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, told Science magazine that "the data does point even further to a market origin."
Florence Débarre, an evolutionary scientist at the French National Institute for Scientific Research, discovered the newly uploaded gene sequences. She then approached evolutionary scientist and University of Arizona professor Michael Worobey, who has published studies supporting the idea that the pandemic originated in a commercial setting.
Various Speculations
The cause of the greatest outbreak in a century has become a hot topic of frequent discussion.
A hypothesis floating around says the virus first appeared in wild animals and then jumped to people through contaminated food at the grocery store. One more thinks it could have gotten out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studies viruses like this one.
An intelligence report from the US energy department and Republican-led investigations probing the origins of the virus have both brought attention to the lab leak hypothesis in recent weeks. Neither argument has any hard evidence to back it up, and that proof may never be uncovered.
Recent genetic evidence does not support the hypothesis that raccoon dogs or other creatures carried and disseminated Covid in the marketplace. A possible means of transmission for the animals would be contacted with infected people. The results, however, do suggest that an infected animal and, eventually, the illicit wildlife trade may have been to blame.
Experts anticipate the argument to continue, but they wonder why the Chinese team did not share the genetic information sooner. The previous director of China's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, George Gao, said the patterns showed "nothing new" to the scientific community.
It also needs to be clarified why the information was removed from the Gisaid server at a later date.
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