Thu | Mar 30, 2023

New COVID origins data point to raccoon dogs in China market

Published:Friday | March 17, 2023 | 4:54 PM
Raccoon dogs are seen at a cage in Tokyo's Ueno zoo Saturday, May 24, 2003. International scientists who examined previously unavailable genetic data from samples collected at a market close to where the first human cases of COVID-19 were detected in China said they found suggestions the pandemic originated from animals, not a lab. Other experts have not yet verified their analysis, which also has not appeared so far in a peer-reviewed journal. (AP Photo/Chika Tsukumo, File)

BEIJING (AP) — Genetic material collected at a Chinese market near where the first human cases of COVID-19 were identified show raccoon dog DNA comingled with the virus, suggesting the pandemic may have originated from animals, not a lab, international experts say.

Other experts have not yet verified their analysis, which has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal.

How the coronavirus began sickening people remains uncertain.

The sequences will have to be matched to the genetic record of how the virus evolved to see which came first.

“These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday.

He criticised China for not sharing the genetic information earlier, telling a press briefing that “this data could have and should have been shared three years ago.”

The samples were collected from surfaces at the Huanan seafood market in early 2020 in Wuhan, where the first human cases of COVID-19 were found in late 2019.

Tedros said the genetic sequences were recently uploaded to the world's biggest public virus database by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

They were then removed, but not before a French biologist spotted the information by chance and shared it with a group of scientists based outside China that's looking into the origins of the coronavirus.

The data show that some of the COVID-positive samples collected from a stall known to be involved in the wildlife trade also contained raccoon dog genes, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to the scientists. Their analysis was first reported in The Atlantic.

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