Geneva, Switzerland.- The World Health Organization (WHO) criticized China this summer for withholding an investigation that could link the origin of Covid-19 with the wild animals and questioned why the data were not available after 3 years.
Before the Chinese data disappeared, an international team of experts downloaded and began to analyze the investigation, which appeared online in February.
The investigation supports the idea that the pandemic could start when raccoon dogs illegally traded infected humans at a seafood market in Wuhan.
“These data do not provide a definitive answer on how the health crisis started, but each data is important to bring us closer to that answer”, said the General Director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus this summer.
According to reports, the gene sequences were deleted from a scientific database once experts offered to collaborate in the analysis with their Chinese counterparts.
“Estos datos could have been shared, and they should have been shared, three years ago”, says Tedros. The evidence that is lacking now must be shared with the international community immediately”.
Tedros assured that scientists from the Chinese Center for the Control and Prevention of Diseases have recently uploaded the genetic sequences into the world’s largest virus public database.
Then they were eliminated, but not before a French biologist discovered the information by chance and shared it with a group of scientists outside China who are investigating the origins of the coronavirus.
The data reveal that some of the positive samples of Covid collected from a person that is known to be involved in the wildlife trade also contain genes from raccoon dogs, which indicates that the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to them scientific. His analysis of it was reported for the first time in The Atlantic.
“There is a good possibility that the animals that deposited this DNA also deposited the virus”, says Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who participated in the analysis of the data. “If you had to go and conduct an environmental survey after a zoonotic spill event, this is basically exactly what you would expect to find.”
Dogs, so called for their raccoon faces, are usually bred for their coat and sold like meat in animal markets across China.
Ray Yip, epidemiologist and founding member of the workshop of the Centers for the Control of Diseases in the US in China, says that the hallmarks are significant, although not definitive.
