WHO links origin of pandemic to Chinese wildlife farms

After months of research, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has found that wildlife farms in China are likely to be the source of COVID-19. According to ecologist Peter Daszak, who is part of the WHO mission to investigate the origins of SRS-CoV-2 in the Asian country.

Many of these wildlife farms are located in or around Yunnan province in southern China. As Daszak explained in an interview on US NPR radio on Tuesday, WHO experts found new evidence that these farms were supplying animals to vendors at the Huanan wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 appeared last year. Some of these wild animals may have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 from bats in the area.

For his part, Daszak, president of the non-governmental organisation EcoHealth Alliance, said that before the pandemic this sector progressed and was used as a tool to lift rural people out of poverty by the government. 

He explained that in 2016 China had 14 million people employed in wildlife farms and it was a $70 billion industry. In 2020, China shut down and ordered employees to dispose of the animals. It further notes that the authorities "issued a statement saying they were going to stop raising wildlife for food" and "sent instructions to farmers on how to safely dispose of the animals (by burying, killing or burning them) so as not to spread disease," it continued. 

He said he sees this as a clear sign that Beijing suspected in early 2020 that these farms might have caused the outbreak because the authorities reacted hastily. 

In January, a team of WHO experts travelled to China to investigate the source of the pandemic, which has infected more than 120 million people and killed 2.6 million worldwide. Researchers believe that farms in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan or neighbouring Myanmar may have caused the virus to jump from a bat to some kind of wild animal and then to humans.

He points out that the most important thing right now is to identify which species and which farm has linked the bat-borne virus to humans. The WHO is now expected to publish its findings in a report in the coming weeks.