(Geneva) An epidemiologist and an animal health specialist from the World Health Organization (WHO) are going to China on an exploratory mission to determine the origin of the new coronavirus, the organization said. Friday.
Posted on 10 July 2020 at 8 o'clock11
France Media Agency
“They're on their way,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said in a virtual meeting, adding that the two experts were expected this weekend in Beijing.
They must prepare the ground for a broader mission which will determine the origin of the coronavirus responsible for more than 550 00 0 dead and more than 12 millions of cases worldwide.
The WHO team will have talks with Chinese officials and will determine the places that the future mission will have to visit, said M me Harris.
“One of the biggest questions is whether the virus has been transmitted to humans by an animal, and what animal it is,” she said. “We know that the coronavirus is very similar to a virus found in bats, but did it go through an intermediate animal?” This is a question that we must see resolved, “she continued.
The work of researchers from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the epidemic appeared 2019 , have demonstrated that the genome sequence of the new coronavirus is at 80% similar to that of SARS, at the origin of a previous epidemic in 2002 – 2003, and to 96% to that of a bald coronavirus- mouse.
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Wuhan Institute of Virology
The vast majority of researchers thus agree that the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 – at the origin of the pandemic – was undoubtedly born in the bat, but scientists believe that it has passed through another species before being transmitted to humans.
It is this piece of the puzzle that the international scientific community and the WHO hope to discover in order to better understand what happened, to better target risky practices and avoid a new pandemic.