Photo: Reuters
Texto: Cuba News 360 Newsroom
The World Health Organization (WHO) has made a new call on China to share all the scientific information that can help determine the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This request arises after learning that China has genetic and molecular results that have been kept on the Huanan animal market, in Wuhan, which was the first place suspected as a possible origin of the virus.
The information came from the China Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), which uploaded the data to an open access scientific platform, reported El Mundo.
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has criticized China for not disclosing genetic information earlier, saying the data could and should have been released three years ago.
Tedros has said that the genetic sequences were uploaded to the world’s largest virus database by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, but were later removed.
A French biologist discovered the data by chance while scouring the database and showed it to a group of scientists outside of China who were looking for the origins of the coronavirus.
Genetic sequencing data revealed that some of the samples, known to be positive for the coronavirus, also contained genetic material from Japanese raccoons, indicating that the animals were infected with the virus.
Experts believe this data is the first concrete indication that wildlife infected with the coronavirus may have been on the market.
However, it is also possible that humans were the first to bring the virus to market and infect Japanese raccoons, or that infected people left traces of the virus near the animals.
Scientists have been searching for the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic since the virus emerged, but the search has been hampered by several factors, including the huge increase in human infections in the first two years of the pandemic and an ongoing political dispute. international.
In January 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) sent a team of experts to Wuhan to investigate the origin of the virus.
Back then, the WHO team found themselves with a lack of access to relevant data and samples, making their investigation difficult and raising suspicions that China was withholding important information.