A new genetic clue points to the raccoon dogs in the Wuhan market as the origin of the covid pandemic

An international team of scientists has found raccoon dog DNA in samples that also had the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus obtained in January 2020, on the surfaces of the Huanan market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, as confirmed by the authors themselves. American magazine

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The finding does not prove anything, but it is another clue that the virus jumped from these animals to humans in that market, where all kinds of living beings were sold illegally and without minimal hygiene measures.

The covid pandemic has killed nearly seven million people since then, according to the World Health Organization.

Raccoon dogs, of the fox family, are nocturnal carnivores that are bred by the millions on Chinese fur farms to trade their pelts.

Another coronavirus that emerged in China in 2002 and killed nearly 800 people, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, was also detected at a Guangdong animal market in raccoon dogs, as well as the masked palm civet. a small mammal from Southeast Asia.

The Chinese dictatorship opted for secrecy from the start of the pandemic.

The international scientific community had not had access to these samples until earlier this month, when researchers from a Chinese government agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, uploaded the genomic data to a public archive called GISAID.

They withdrew them immediately without giving explanations, but the biologist Florence Débarre, from the National Center for Scientific Research in France, had already downloaded them to her computer, according to The

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The American ecologist Michael Worobey, from the University of Arizona, has been one of those responsible for the analysis of the Chinese data.

He is one of the world's leading experts on the origin of viruses.

His lab revealed seven years ago that HIV emerged in Africa in the first half of the 20th century, probably jumped to Haiti in the 1960s and from there to New York in the 1970s. The team has found genetic material from raccoon dogs in several samples taken at the Huanan market, including some obtained from a shopping cart and from a poultry plucking machine.

The researchers presented their results this Tuesday in their group of specialists in new pathogens that advises the World Health Organization, always according to the American magazine.

The new data has not yet been published,

, already pointed to this origin.

Another of the study's authors, Australian virologist Edward Holmes, visited the Huanan market in 2014 and photographed cages with raccoon dogs at stall 29, the same one where samples were taken in the early days of the covid pandemic.

The scientific community was already expecting another coronavirus jump from its natural reservoir, bats, to humans, through some intermediate host, such as raccoon dogs sold in live animal markets in China.

That's why Holmes, from the University of Sydney, kept an eye on these places.

The director of the Institute of Virology at the Berlin Charité Hospital, Christian Drosten, pointed directly to Chinese hatcheries since the start of the pandemic.

“Raccoon dogs are a huge industry in China, where they are farmed and also wild-caught for their fur.

If someone gave me a few hundred thousand dollars and freedom of movement in China to find the source of the virus, I would look in the places where raccoon dogs are bred," he said on April 26, 2020 in an interview with the British newspaper

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History repeats itself every so often.

Virologist Shi Zhengli, known as Batwoman for her research with bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, published in 2018 that another coronavirus, named SADS-CoV, jumped from bats to pigs, causing an outbreak of diarrhea that killed some 25,000 piglets in four farms in the Chinese province of Guangdong.

On that occasion, the virus did not pass from pigs to humans.

Images of the Huanan Animal Market published in a scientific study in 2021.Worobey et al

The hypothesis of the natural leap from raccoon dogs to people in the Huanan market is not the only one on the table to explain the origin of the pandemic.

When the first cases of pneumonia in Wuhan began to be known at the end of December 2019, Shi Zhengli herself thought that a virus could have come out of her laboratory, as she herself acknowledged in March 2020 in Scientific American

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It made perfect sense.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a dozen kilometers from the Huanan market.

The coronaviruses, in addition, had already escaped other times from Chinese laboratories.

The World Health Organization expressed its "concern" on May 18, 2004, after two researchers at the National Institute of Virology in Beijing became infected with the SARS coronavirus in the laboratory.

The first scientist fell ill at the end of March, but the Chinese dictatorship hid it until April 22, 2004. The hypothesis of another leak from a laboratory as the start of the covid pandemic was logical, but for now all the scientific evidence points to in another direction: Huanan Live Animal Market.

The US Department of Energy and the FBI continue to consider it most likely that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a scientific center in Wuhan, but acknowledge that they do not have any conclusive proof.

Another of the authors of the new study, Danish biologist Kristian Andersen, has summarized his opinion in

, acknowledging that his results do not prove that there were raccoon dogs infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan.

“I think there were infected animals in the market?

Yes I believe it.

Is this new data added to previous tests?

Yes”, explained Andersen, from the Scripps Institute, in the US city of San Diego.

“Are we sure that the intermediate host was raccoon dogs?

No. Are they at the top of my list of potential hosts?

Yes, but they are not the only ones.

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