The World Health Organization (WHO) made an umpteenth appeal this Friday for China to share all the scientific information useful to determine the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The call arises after learning that China preserves genetic and molecular results on the animal market, which was the first place it was suspected.
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The information, from China’s Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), was posted on an open-access scientific platform in January and discovered by European experts.
They analyzed the information and communicated their results to the WHO, but since then all that data has been deleted, according to efe.
The WHO indicated that as soon as he found out about this (five days ago) he asked the Chinese authorities to make the information available, which has not happened yet.
He clarified that these data do not allow us to draw a definitive conclusion about how the pandemic began, but they constitute “an important piece to get closer to an answer.”
New data
Western scientists who were able to download and work with the information from China made a presentation of their findings to a WHO expert group dedicated to establishing the origin of new pathogens, including the cause of COVID-19.
The organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told a virtual press conference that “this information could and should have been shared three years ago” and reiterated his request to China to act transparently.
For now, the indirect information that the organization has received corresponds to genetic and molecular tests of samples collected at the Wuhan food and animal market in January 2020 and which tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
hypotheses persist
However, “the virus has not been identified in animals or samples of animals on the market, nor have we found animals that have infected humans,” said the technical manager for the fight against the pandemic at the WHO, Maria Van Kherkove. .
“We have directly asked the China CDC to make this information available to the international community. Any information that there is, any data that exists, whether it is from China or from another country, must be shared,” he insisted.
The epidemiologist emphasized that different hypotheses about the origin of the coronavirus remain, which has caused almost seven million deaths, 5,000 of them in the last week alone.
In this regard, several media outlets highlighted this week that an international team of scientists had found raccoon dog DNA in samples that also had the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
These samples were obtained in January 2020, on the surfaces of the Wuhan market, according to what the authors themselves told the American magazine. The Atlantic.
WHO asks countries to share information on the origin of COVID-19
The WHO has told China that more studies should be done to trace the animal that may have acted as an intermediary and infected humans, the virus leaking from a laboratory, as well as the place of origin of the animals in the market. from Wuhan.
“The part of information that we don’t have up to now, for example, is where the animals came from, which farm. We also ask for serological tests from the people who worked in the market or on the farms where the animals came from, but these are all questions that have not been answered,” Van Kherkove said.
Efe/OnCuba.
