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NEWS
The path of the coronavirus to humans remains a mystery.
A research team believes they have found a new piece of the puzzle in their search.
They suspect that an outbreak of African swine fever may have triggered the pandemic.
According to the British-Chinese research team, a severe outbreak of the deadly swine disease may have paved the way for the Covid-19 pandemic, according to The Guardian.
Swine fever swept through China in 2018, dramatically reducing the supply of pork and increasing the risk of a virus spreading to humans when looking for alternative sources for meat, the researchers say.
Pork is the main meat consumption of the Chinese and the country accounts for half of the world’s pork production. It produces about 55 million tons of pork each year, according to The Guardian.
African swine fever, which affects domestic pigs and wild boar, is a contagious and deadly viral disease. If the infection enters a swine population, the only way out is to euthanize everyone.
Photo: Mark Schiefelbein / AP
An outbreak of African swine fever may have triggered a pandemic, researchers suspect.
Chinese pig dead leaflets
During the last quarter of 2019, swine fever had spread across most of China and meant that between 40 and 60 percent of the entire swine population disappeared. This crisis coincides quite well with the first cases of the then unknown disease.
The researchers’ theory is that a reduced supply led to higher prices and higher demand for wild animals, which are sold in many markets across the country.
– More wild animals enter the human food chain, either through hunting or by going to the market and buying alternative forms of meat. If it increases, it can increase contact opportunities, study author David Robertson, a professor of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow, tells The Guardian.
– It simply increases the possibility of the virus spreading to humans.
The first group of covid-19 was discovered in Wuhan, China, but the disease may have occurred elsewhere in the past.
A study of 41 early confirmed cases showed that 70 percent of those infected were linked in one way or another to the Huanan market, which sold shellfish, but also live wildlife. These were often illegally caught in the wild and slaughtered in front of customers.
But the first confirmed case had no connection to the market and no infected animals were found there.
Photo: Kin Cheung / AP
Women buy meat in a market. Stock Photography.
See the pig theory as a piece of the puzzle
David Robertson hopes that the pig theory will increase understanding of how the infection spreads to humans and explains how the famine after swine fever may have led many Chinese to go to extreme measures to get something to eat.
– We show a disturbance. Think of a wall, this is just a brick in a wall of evidence. This is something that we think needs to be taken into account to understand what happened, the professor tells The Guardian.
Researchers, including a team from WHO, continue to track the infection. The most widespread theory is that it originally came from bats and spread to humans, possibly through another animal as an intermediary.
– It may take many years to discover the probable path. It is unlikely that we will ever know exactly what happened, but it is likely that we will find a virus related to Sars-CoV-2 in a bat or possibly another animal. And then we can wonder how the infection got to people, says David Robertson to the newspaper.
The research team’s analysis is awaiting peer review. They emphasize that the pig shortage theory is just a hypothesis.
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