A member of the World Health Organization research team says that wildlife farms in southern China are the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic.
China closed these wildlife farms in February 2020, says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at the EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO delegation who traveled to China this year. During that trip, Daszak says, the WHO team found new evidence that these wildlife farms supplied animals to vendors at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan.
Daszak told the NPR that the government’s response was a strong sign that the Chinese government thought these farms were the most likely way for a coronavirus in bats in southern China to reach humans in Wuhan.
These wildlife farms, including those in the Yunnan region, are part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years.
“They take exotic animals, such as civets, hedgehogs, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo mice, and raise them in captivity,” says Daszak.
The agency is expected to disclose the team’s investigative findings in the next two weeks. In the meantime, Daszak gave NPR a spotlight on what the team found.
“China has promoted the breeding of wild animals as a way of alleviating rural populations from poverty,” says Daszak. The farms helped the government meet ambitious goals to end the rural-urban divide, as reported by NPR last year.
“It was very successful,” says Daszak. “In 2016, they had 14 million people employed on wildlife farms and it was a $ 70 billion industry.”
Then, on February 24, 2020, when the outbreak in Wuhan was subsiding, the Chinese government took a complete turn on the farms.
“What China did was very important,” says Daszak. “They released a statement saying they would stop growing wild animals for food.”
The government closed the farms. “They sent instructions to farmers on how to safely dispose of animals – bury, kill or burn them – in a way that would not spread disease.”
Why would the government do that? Because, Daszak thinks, these farms could be the place of overflow, where the coronavirus jumped from a bat to another animal and then to people. “I think SARS-CoV-2 hit people for the first time in southern China. It seems that way.”
First, many farms are located in or around a southern province, Yunnan, where virologists have found a bat virus that is genetically 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease . Second, farms raise animals that are known to carry coronaviruses, such as civet cats and pangolins.
Finally, during the WHO mission to China, Daszak said the team found new evidence that these farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan, where an early outbreak of COVID-19 occurred.
The market was closed overnight on December 31, 2019, after being linked to cases of what was then described as a mysterious pneumonia-like illness.
“There was a massive transmission going on in that market, for sure,” said Linfa Wang, a virologist who studies bat viruses at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. He is also part of the WHO investigation team. Wang says that after the outbreak in the Huanan market, Chinese scientists went there and looked for the virus.
“In the live animals section, they had a lot of positive samples,” said Wang. “They still have two samples from which they can isolate live viruses.”
And so Daszak and other members of the WHO team believe that wildlife farms have provided a perfect channel between a coronavirus-infected bat in Yunnan (or neighboring Myanmar) and an animal market in Wuhan.
“China closes this path for a reason,” says Daszak. “The reason was that, in February 2020, they believed that this was the most likely path [for the coronavirus to spread to Wuhan]. And when the WHO report is published … we believe it is the most likely path as well. “
The next step, says Daszak, is to find out specifically which animal carried the virus and on which of the many wildlife farms.
Copyright NPR 2021.