Bats To Pangolin To Humans, Scientists Claim To Identify 'Missing Link' In Coronavirus Outbreak

Ever since the deadly Coronavirus outbreak was reported in Wuhan, China, scientists have been frantically looking for the source animal from which the virus get transmitted to humans.

Even though initially it was believed that the virus was spread from bats, researchers had pointed out that the chances of the virus getting transmitted from bats to humans were unlikely.

Now a group of Chinese scientists has claimed that they have identified the 'missing link' the puzzle. They believe that pangolin, a critically endangered animal that is a much sought after commodity in the Chinese illegal wildlife trade markets could have spread the virus to humans.

Researchers at the South China Agricultural University have identified the scaly mammal as a "potential intermediate host," the university said in a statement, without providing further details.

The new virus is believed to have originated in bats, but researchers have suggested there could have been an "intermediate host" in the transmission to humans.

After testing more than 1,000 samples from wild animals, scientists from the university found the genome sequences of viruses found on pangolins to be 99 percent identical to those on coronavirus patients, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Virus experts think it may have originated in bats and then passed to humans, possibly via another species. It said the research had found pangolins - the world's only scaly mammals - to be "the most likely intermediate host."

AFP

The pangolin is considered the most trafficked animal on the planet and more than one million have been snatched from Asian and African forests in the past decade, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

They are destined for markets in China and Vietnam, where their scales are used in traditional medicine despite having no medical benefits and their meat is bought on the black market.

Pangolin is said to be the ideal candidate as researchers have long suspected that the virus was passed from an animal to a human at a market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Wuhan has a huge market that sells all kinds of animals or animal-based products including live foxes, crocodiles, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines, camel meat, etc. including many those are banned.

The country has long been accused by conservationists of tolerating a shadowy trade in endangered animals for food or as ingredients in traditional medicines.

However, scientists outside China are less convinced and called for Chinese scientists to release more data from their research. Simply reporting the similarity between the genome sequences of viruses is "not sufficient," said James Wood, a veterinary medicine professor at the University of Cambridge.

Wood said the results could have been caused by "contamination from a highly infected environment."

"We would need to see all of the genetic data to get a feel for how related the human and pangolin viruses are," Jonathan Bell, a professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham, said.

Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor of veterinary medicine at Hong Kong's City University, also said the research was a long way from establishing a link between pangolins and the new coronavirus outbreak in humans.

"You can only draw more definitive conclusions if you compare prevalence (of the coronavirus) between different species based on representative samples, which these almost certainly are not," he said.