New COVID origin data point for raccoon dogs in China market

Other experts have yet to verify his analysis, which has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal. How the coronavirus began making people sick remains uncertain. The sequences would have to be matched to genetic records of how the virus evolved to see which came first.

“These data do not provide a definitive answer as to how the pandemic started, but every piece of data is important to move us closer to that answer,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said on Friday.

He criticized China for not sharing the genetic information earlier, telling a press briefing that “this data could and should have been shared three years ago.”

The samples were collected in Wuhan in early 2020 from surfaces at the Huanan Seafood Market, where the first human cases of COVID-19 were found in late 2019.

Tedros said the genetic sequence was recently uploaded to the world’s largest public virus database by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

They were then removed, but not before a French biologist chanced upon the information and shared it with a group of scientists based outside China that is looking into the origins of the coronavirus.

The data showed that some COVID-positive samples collected from a stall involved in the wildlife trade also contained raccoon dog genes, indicating the animals may have been infected with the virus, according to the scientists. Their analysis was first reported in The Atlantic.

“There’s a good chance that animals that deposited DNA also deposited virus,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who analyzed the data. of a zoonotic spillover event … it’s basically what you’d expect to find.”

The dogs, named after raccoon-like faces, are often bred for their fur and sold for meat in animal markets across China.

Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and founding member of the US Centers for Disease Control Office in China, said the findings are important, even though they are not definitive.

“The market environmental sampling data published by the China CDC is the strongest evidence to date to support an animal origin,” Yip told the AP in an email. He was not associated with the new analysis.

The WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, cautioned that the analysis did not find the virus within any animal, nor was there any conclusive evidence that an animal infects humans.

“What it does provide are clues to help us understand what might have happened,” she said.

“There is molecular evidence that the animals were sold in a Hunan market and this is new information,” van Kerkhove said.

The genetic code of the coronavirus is similar to that of bat coronaviruses, and many scientists suspect that COVID-19 jumped into humans either directly from bats or through an intermediary animal such as pangolins, ferrets or raccoon dogs.

tries to trace the origins of covid-19 pandemic The first two years of the pandemic have been complicated by factors including a massive surge of human infections and increasingly fraught political controversy.

It took virus experts more than a dozen years to pinpoint the animal origin of the related virus SARS.

Goldstein and his colleagues say their analysis is the first solid indication that the market may contain wildlife infected with the coronavirus. But it is also possible that humans brought the virus to market and infected the raccoon dogs, or that infected humans simply left traces of the virus with the animals.

After contact with the scientists in the group China The CDC, he says, had removed the sequences from the global virus database. The researchers are perplexed as to why the data from the samples collected three years ago was not made public sooner. Tedros has urged China to share more of its COVID-19 research data.

Gao Fu, former head of the Chinese CDC and lead author of the Chinese newspaper, did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press requesting comment. But he told Science magazine that the sequence was “nothing new. It was discovered that illegal animal trading was taking place and that’s why the market was immediately closed.”

Goldstein said his group presented its findings this week to an advisory panel tasked by the WHO to investigate the origins of COVID-19.

Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Edinburgh, said it would be important to see how the genetic sequences of raccoon dogs match up with what is known about the historical evolution of the COVID-19 virus. If the dogs are shown to have COVID and they prove an earlier origin than the virus infected people, “that’s probably as good evidence as we can hope that it was a spillover event in the market.”

After a week-long trip to China to study the origins of the pandemic, the WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 probably jumped from animals to humans, making the possibility of a laboratory origin “extremely unlikely”. dismissed as a possibility”.

But the UN health agency backtracked the next year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing. And Tedros has said all hypotheses are on the table.

China’s CDC scientists, who previously analyzed samples from the Huanan market, published a paper as a preprint in February suggesting that humans brought the virus to the market, not animals, which means that the virus originated elsewhere. Their paper did not mention that animal genes were found in the samples that tested positive.

Wuhan, the Chinese city where COVID-19 was first detected, is home to several laboratories involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling theories that the virus may have leaked from one.

In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Energy had assessed “with low confidence” that the virus had leaked from a laboratory. But others in the US intelligence community disagreed, believing it first came from animals. Experts say the true origins of the pandemic may not be known for many years – if ever.

The text of this story is published from a wire agency feed without any modification.