Just over three years after the start of the
coronavirus
pandemic that forced a large part of the world to undergo quarantine to prevent the spread of the disease, a group of scientists again ruled out that the infection came from a laboratory and insisted in
transmission from animal to human.
This is one of the many investigations that have been carried out in recent months in order to find the origin of covid-19, which until now is not clear.
Various theories were considered, from an escape during a series of experiments to
contagion from animals such as bats or pangolins.
However, now all eyes are on another mammal: the
raccoon dogs
that were traded in the market in
Wuhan, China, where the first cases broke out.
According to experts, it would be an infected animal that was being treated through the illegal wildlife trade.
The results arise from the two genetic data that was extracted from swabs taken in and around the wholesale seafood market.
They belong to
walls, floors, metal cages and vehicles used to transport animal cages.
In this sense, in the samples that tested positive for the coronavirus, the international research team found genetic material belonging to animals, including large amounts that matched the raccoon dog.
They continue to target the Wuhan market due to the origin of the coronavirus.
Photo Hector Retamal/AFP
The analysis established that the same - furry animals that are related to foxes and are known to transmit the coronavirus - deposited "genetic signatures in the same place where the genetic material of the virus was left."
And according to the scientists "this evidence is consistent with a scenario in which
the virus had spread to humans from a wild animal."
Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who was involved in the data analysis said: “There is a good chance that the animals that deposited the DNA also deposited the virus.
If one were to do environmental sampling after a zoonotic spill event… this is exactly what you would expect to find.”
The results of the samples reopen the controversy with China since it is data that should have been analyzed years ago.
"These data could and should have been released three years ago," WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference.
They target a raccoon dog for the origin of the coronavirus
The samples were collected after the first human cases of COVID-19 appeared in late 2019, he said, and were uploaded to the world's largest virus database by scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
But they didn't see each other until a French biologist found her by chance.
He then added: "These data do not give a definitive answer to how the pandemic started, but each one is important in getting us closer to that answer."
The United States insists that the origin of the covid was due to a leak from a laboratory in China
US authorities once again raised the possibility that Covid-19 may have spread after the virus leaked from a laboratory in China, The Wall Street Journal reported.
He agreed to the investigation carried out in this regard by the United States Department of Energy, which received new confidential information about the origins of the disease that unleashed the pandemic in 2020.
It concluded in the aforementioned hypothesis that had been postulated at the beginning of the outbreak of cases worldwide, which stated that it was an error in one of the Chinese laboratories.
DB
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