"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.She doesn't like to be bothered to help others too much as she thinks that would spoil them. "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.ĭirk 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. Wood said the results could have been caused by "contamination from a highly infected environment." 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. However, scientists outside China are less convinced and called for Chinese scientists to release more data from their research. The country has long been accused by conservationists of tolerating a shadowy trade in endangered animals for food or as ingredients in traditional medicines. 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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). It said the research had found pangolins - the world's only scaly mammals - to be "the most likely intermediate host." Virus experts think it may have originated in bats and then passed to humans, possibly via another species. 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.Īfter 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. 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. ![]() 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. Now a group of Chinese scientists has claimed that they have identified the 'missing link' the puzzle. 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.Įven 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.
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