among them First reportA team of international scientists gathered by the World Health Organization to advise on the origin of the coronavirus said on Thursday that bats could carry coronavirus ancestors and spill on mammals sold in the wildlife market. He said he had sex. However, the team said more Chinese data is needed, including the possibility that lab leaks played a role in studying how the virus spreads to people.
A team appointed by WHO in October as an organization attempted to reset its approach to studying the origin of a pandemic shared information with Chinese scientists twice, including from unpublished research. Said. However, the gap in China’s report made it difficult to determine when and where the outbreak occurred, the report said.
Independent experts say WHO breaks through China’s political barriers, where a team of scientists from the United States, China and 20 other countries has stagnated most of the information that causes the virus to emerge. He said it was unclear how it would help. Country border.
“The lack of political cooperation from China continues to curb meaningful progress,” said Lawrence Gostin, head of the O’Neill National and World Health Law Institute at Georgetown University. He said the report provides a roadmap for investigating future pandemics in low-secret countries.
WHO sought advice from the group not only to study the origin of the coronavirus, but also to investigate the emergence of future pathogens. Known as a scientific advisory group on the origin of new pathogens, this team does not have the authority to conduct investigations in China or elsewhere.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, said the report was “just the beginning of their work.”
This group was expected to be more open to Labo Leak than the previous team WHO sent to China in early 2021. Earlier teams in a joint report with China stated that lab leaks were possible but “very unlikely.” WHO Secretary Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the assessment was premature.
According to the latest report, there is no new data indicating a lab leak. However, the group leader said he would like to evaluate the evidence that will emerge in the future.
Marietjie Venter, chairman of the team and professor of medical virology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said:
Efforts to investigate the lab’s leaks, according to the report, were hit by resistance from team members in China, Russia and Brazil who were unaware of the need for such an investigation.
The report referred to many studies on the potential role of animals in the emergence of coronavirus, published since the work of the previous WHO team. for example, Investigation A survey of the live animal market in Wuhan, China, showed that some species known to be susceptible to the coronavirus were present in the fall of 2019.
As people involved in the market began to get sick, police closed and disinfected the facility, making it more difficult for scientists to identify potential intermediate animal hosts for the virus.
The latest report acknowledges the number of unpublished studies posted online as “preprints,” but states that it focuses on published, peer-reviewed studies. Among them were two papers published this year, in which a team of scientists claimed that a pandemic occurred when bats were infected with wild animals such as raccoon dogs. Wuhan market.
Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who helped carry out these studies, said it was a pity that the WHO team did not scrutinize the unpublished studies.
“If you read our preprints and understand the evidence, I think there is really strong evidence that the pandemic actually originated through wildlife in the Huanan Seafood Market,” he said.
Dr. Warobib and other researchers said in January 2020 that a significant opportunity to focus the search for coronavirus on market-supplied wildlife farms such as Hoanan was lost. Instead, millions of animals have been reported to have been killed.
Philipparenzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, praised the latest report noting the lack of published findings from China’s own origin studies. However, she said her proposal for a study of future pandemic origins did not adequately explain the investigation of “accidental or deliberate events” that required non-public health expertise.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said the report revealed that future pandemic threats need to be mitigated, considering both animal and laboratory origins. I did.
“Both of these are serious enough possibilities, so we need to think together,” he said.
The report recommended the study of genomic data from blood and early virus samples from workers in wildlife farms and live animal markets. However, previous WHO teams have proposed some similar studies that did not help.
According to the latest report, Dr. Tedros wrote to Chinese authorities twice in February requesting information on the status of these studies and potential laboratory leaks. However, there was no sign that WHO could persuade China to share the results of such work.
However, despite the difficulties, information from China came out little by little.
Chinese researchers last week Release A small study of raccoon dogs and bats collected in the Wuhan area in January 2020. In 15 raccoon dogs, researchers have discovered a new species of coronavirus associated with those that infect dogs. In 334 bats, researchers discovered a coronavirus that looked like a mixture of viruses. Some are related to what caused Covid and some are related to what caused SARS in 2003.
“These sample sizes aren’t big enough,” said Maciej Boni, a virologist at Pennsylvania State University. “To get the big picture, we need to sample on the scale of tens of thousands of bats.”
