"The Coronavirus did not start from the Wuhan market: confirmation arrives"

According to a study by the Broad Institute it would not have been an animal, but a human being, to spread Covid-19

THE EDITORIAL TEAM 2020-05-17 14:08:55

 

CAMBRIDGE (United States) - A recent study has denied the Chinese thesis that the Coronavirus  started from the Wuhan market, transmitted by a wild animal (the pangolin or the bat), but rather by a human being previously infected. According to reports from the Daily Mail, researchers would have been particularly surprised by a pre-adaptability shown by Covid-19 in spreading from human to human. These statements will give new life to the current of thought accusing the Chinese government of cover-up. The new study on SARS-CoV-2 - the strain responsible for the pandemic - examines genetic samples from patients along with those taken during the 2002-04 SARS outbreak, a coronavirus transmitted from bats to humans through the manipulation and consumption of civets. The article is by Alina Chan and Ben Deverman, scientists from the Broad Institute, a research unit affiliated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Shing Zhan , of the University of British Columbia.

"Coronavirus doesn't come from animals"

" The available genetic data do not highlight the transmission capacity of the virus by the species present in the Wuhan market ", say Alina Chan , molecular biologist, and Shing Zhan , evolutionary biologist, thus denying the "zoonotic" transmission (from animal to human ): " The possibility that a non-genetically modified precursor could adapt to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered ." Furthermore, the scientists pointed out that all this had already been quite evident after the analysis carried out on a Wuhan patient infected last December. 

Coronavirus, China accused of cover-up

In this new context entered the parliamentary Tory Bob Seely , member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Commons, who said: " We have to go deep into many things in relation to Covid-19. We need to know where this virus came from , because we were once told that there was no human transmission. What is the role of the Chinese Communist Party? ". China closed the Wuhan market the day after warning WHO of the outbreak and from there began a whole series of studies on animal samples taken. What is suspicious is the fact that, four months later, no results have been shared with foreign scientists. The United States, in the person of  Trump, speak of a virus escaped from a laboratory, the Chinese response instead translates into an accusation against the American army.

The new coronavirus may have appeared in a mine in 2012

According to a Sunday Times investigation, the infection may have originated in an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan, full of guano and bats. The six workers who visited it were struck by an abnormal pneumonia and three died. Now a team of WHO scientists will travel to China to investigate

reading time: 6 min

by Eugenio Buzzetti

CHINA CORONAVIRUS

updated at 06:44 07 July 2020


The coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic would have appeared in China as early as 2012, when six people developed anomalous pneumonia after being sent to clean up an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan , the far south of China, full of guano and bats, and breeding ground for potentially lethal micro-organisms and pathogens.

This is what emerges from an investigation on the origin of the coronavirus published by the Sunday Times, which dates back to the discovery of a new type of coronavirus similar to that of Sars: three of the six workers who had visited the mine died following hospitalization , after having developed symptoms not attributable to other known pathologies. Their case appeared inexplicable and submitted to pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan, who had already distinguished himself for the management of the SARS epidemic in 2003 and who would return to the fore in early 2020, at the head of the team of Chinese government scientists who had the task to manage the new epidemic.

The three surviving patients - plus a quarter who would die later - underwent an antibody test: the examination revealed that none of them had contracted Sars, but all four had contracted a new type of coronavirus similar to that. which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome. 

The case attracted the attention of a group of scientists, who, equipped with protective suits and goggles and respirators, entered the mine a few months later, in August 2012, and collected hundreds of samples for research. Among them was Shi Zhengli, the bat scientist, who had begun her research on these animals and the viruses related to them in 2004, becoming the leading expert in the Asian country.

Fecal samples from 276 bats, collected over a year, were sent to the Wuhan institute, where China's first bio-security level 4 laboratory was under construction, which would only be completed in 2017, and which could have hosted the studies on the most dangerous pathogens for humans. The need for a structure of that type, the first in China, had become indispensable due to the quantity of samples collected and the possible risks: the first discoveries indicated the coexistence of multiple coronaviruses inside the mine, as emerged from a 2016 study that Shi Zhengli herself worked on. One of these was a "new strain" of Sars which was initially named RaBtCov / 4991, found in a particular type of bat. The laboratory, however, had raised doubts about the actual safety of the structure by scientists from the US Embassy in China who visited it in 2018, as emerged from diplomatic cables cited by the Washington Post in recent months.

Another factor of concern would have been the experiments on the mutation of the virus to understand the level of infectivity. Shi defended himself from criticism by stating that that type of experiments were important to understand how an ordinary coronavirus could turn into a killer, as had happened for Sars.

When the news of the first patients suffering from anomalous pneumonia spread on December 30, the scientist - from Shanghai where she was - quickly returned to Wuhan. For days he checked the laboratory and the analyzes carried out on the first patients, many of whom had visited a local market that sold game: there was no evidence with the viruses studied in the laboratory, a thesis that he publicly supported several times. In a study of his on February 3, published by Nature, Shi cited bats as the probable origin of the new coronavirus, revealing that his laboratory had a virus with a similarity level to that of Covid-19 equal to 96.2% . The virus available in the laboratory, named RaTG13, therefore provided the closest evidence to the origin of the coronavirus responsible for the

Other studies and confirmations received by the Sunday Times itself reveal that that virus would have been the same RaBtCov / 4991 discovered in the abandoned Yunnan mine in 2012 and renamed. Despite the denials of the Wuhan laboratory of having played a role in the spread of the coronavirus, doubts about the origin of Covid-19 have not been resolved: the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the center of strong international controversy that pointed the finger against China, accusing it of opacity in the management of the epidemic.

In the coming days, a team of scientists from the World Health Organization will travel to China precisely to begin investigations into the origin of the coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 responsible for Covid-19, and to try to understand any links between the Yunnan bats and the Wuhan laboratory, over a thousand kilometers away.

 

New study about coronavirus shows; smokers, vegans are lower to the risk of Corona virus.

Smokers and vegetarians were found to have lower seropositivity indicating that they may be at a lesser risk of getting infected by coronavirus, according to a pan-India serosurvey conducted by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The survey was conducted across CSIR's nearly 40 institutes.

The survey also found that those with blood group 'O' may be less susceptible to the infection, while people with 'B' and 'AB' blood groups were at a higher risk.

In order to assess the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the Scientific and Industrial Research Council (CSIR) took samples of 10,427 adult individuals working in its laboratories or institutions and their family members on the basis of voluntary participation.


The CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Delhi study recorded that of the 10,427 individuals, 1,058 (10.14 percent) had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.

In July last year, the Ministry of Health of the Union reported that smokers were likely to be more vulnerable to Covid-19, as smoking increases the risk of virus transmission from hand to mouth, and cautioned that smoking tobacco products may increase the severity of respiratory infections and render people susceptible to coronavirus.

However, the study suggested that smokers are less likely to be seropositive and despite Covid-19 being a respiratory disease, smoking may be protective.

"The study found that higher seropositivity was found for those using public transport and with occupational responsibilities such as security, housekeeping personnel, non-smokers, and non-vegetarians."

"Use of private transport, lower-exposure occupations, smoking, vegetarianism, and 'A' or 'O' blood groups appeared to be protective, using seropositivity as a surrogate for infection," the paper added.

Shantanu Sengupta, senior scientist at IGIB and one of the co-authors of the paper said this is for the first time that a study has been conducted in India wherein individuals have been monitored for three months (35 individuals) to six months (346 individuals) for antibodies including those with probable neutralising activity.

The CSIR has some 40 institutes covering the length and the breadth of the country and each specialises in different fields. The IGIB and its sister institute Centre of Cellular and Molecular Biology have been at the forefront in conducting the genome sequencing of coronavirus.